Biosensor-based magnetostrictive microcantilever

There is an urgent need for biosensors that are able to detect and quantify the presence of a small amount of biological threat agents in a real-time manner. The magnetostrictive microcantilever (MSMC) as the biosensor platform is reported in this paper. The resonance behavior and the sensitivity of MSMC as sensor platform were characterized and compared to the theoretical calculation. The stability and the performance of the MSMC in liquid are studied. The feasibility of MSMC as a high performance biosensor platform is demonstrated by detecting yeast cells in real-time manner used MSMC based-biosensor. Compare to current microcantilevers, the MSMCs have following advantages: 1) remote/wireless driving and sensing; 2) easy to fabricate. More importantly, the MSMC exhibits very high quality merit factor (Q value).