Speakers
Description
A novel chip-scale electrochemical biosensor is being developed to detect biomolecules with high sensitivity. Unlike traditional methods such as qPCR that require specialized equipment and trained personal, these cost-effective and portable chip-scale sensors are designed to administer tests at the point of care. Target molecules of interest are immobilized on the surface, and specific interactions with molecules that diffuse onto the surface from solution produces an electrochemical signal. To prevent non-specific interactions that may contaminate the signal, the sensor surface is coated with a thin passivating self-asssembled monolayer (SAM). The SAM degrades over time, which exposes sensor's bare metal surface and can lead to non-specific interactions. Understanding and predicting SAM degradation is key to producing reliable biosensors. A probabilistic cellular automaton (PCA) model for SAM degradation is given and solved explicitly in one dimension. A continuous-time limit is computed for the case of Poisson distributed probabilities.
