Highly sensitive biosensors based on water-soluble conjugated polymers

Conjugated, conductive polymers are a kind of important organic macromolecules, which has found applications in a variety of areas. The application of conjugated polymers in developing fluorescent biosensors represents the merge of polymer sciences and biological sciences. Conjugated polymers are very good light harvesters as well as fluorescent polymers, and they are also “molecular wires”. Through elaborate designs, these important features, i.e. efficient light harvesting and electron/energy transfer, can be used as signal amplification in fluorescent biosensors. This might significantly improve the sensitivity of conjugated polymer-based biosensors. In this article, we reviewed the application of conjugated polymers, via either electron transfer or energy transfer, to detections of gene targets, antibodies or enzymes. We also reviewed recent efforts in conjugated polymer-based solid-state sensor designs as well as chip-based multiple target detection. Possible directions in this conjugated polymer-based biosensor area are also discussed.