Physcial Sciences Division
Staff Awards & Honors

January 2008

Article on Using Carbon Nanoelectrodes to Sense Glucose Highly Cited

An article on a nanotechnology that could provide more reliable and more affordable testing of diabetes was named a highly cited article by Thomson's ISI. Enlarge image

An article by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Boston College on their new nanotechnology-based method for measuring blood glucose was named a highly cited paper by Thomson ISI's Essential Science Indicators.

Highly cited papers are articles in the top 1 percent of the most-cited papers during the last 10 years. Citations are counted from all sources and are cumulated from the year of publication through the current year.

On the October 2007 list, the article "Glucose Biosensors Based on Carbon Nanotube Nanoelectrode Ensembles" was listed as a highly cited article. It has been cited 149 times since it was published in 2004.

The paper describes an extremely sensitive and selective sensor that can measure glucose even in the presence of interfering chemicals. The sensor is created by attaching glucose oxidase enzymes to the tips of nanotubes, which are 10,000 times smaller in diameter than a human hair. The nanotubes are grown on an electrode contact, and when the tip of the nanotube touches sugar in the sample, the enzymes catalyze a reaction creating current (or signal) that is then measured. The more current produced, the higher the sugar level.

The article on this patented technology was authored by Yuehe Lin and Fan Lu of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Yi Tu and Zhifeng Ren of Boston College. The research was funded by DOE, the National Science Foundation, and the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at PNNL. Key research described in this article was done at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility, at PNNL.

Citation: Lin, Y., F Lu, Y Tu, and Z Ren. 2004. "Glucose Biosensors Based on Carbon Nanotube Nanoelectrode Ensembles." Nano Letters 4(2):191-195.