In Silico insights on the electrode high sensitivity to salts.

Abstract

Recent findings in sensing and biosensing based on electrical measurements point to a very high sensitivity, in which the introduction of one molecule of an analyte into one million (or more) molecules of water is already detectable. In some cases, the high sensitivity could be attributed to specific interactions between the analyte and the molecules on the sensing unit, but results have also been published of considerable sensitivity of bare electrodes for molecules with no molecular recognition capability. This is the case of some electronic tongues reported in the literature. lt seems that the presence of trace amounts of the analyte, e.g. a NaCl molecule, is sufficient to ai ter the properties of the water at the interface, particularly because the electrical measurements are very sensitive to interface changes.