FAST (Flexible Acetylcholine Sensing Thread): Real-Time Detection of Acetylcholine with a Flexible Solid-Contact Potentiometric Sensor

Acetylcholine (ACh) is involved in memory and learning and has implications in neurodegenerative diseases; it is therefore important to study the dynamics of ACh in the brain. This work creates a flexible solid-contact potentiometric sensor for in vitro and in vivo recording of ACh in the brain and tissue homogenate. We fabricate this sensor using a 250 μm diameter cotton yarn coated with a flexible conductive ink and an ACh sensing membrane that contains a calix[4]arene ionophore. The exposed ion-to-electron transducer was sealed with a 2.5 μm thick Parylene C coating to maintain the flexibility of the sensor. The resulting diameter of the flexible ACh sensing thread (FAST) was 400 μm. The FAST showed a linear response range from 1.0 μM to 10.0 mM in deionized water, with a near-Nernstian slope of 56.11 mV/decade and a limit of detection of 2.6 μM. In artificial cerebrospinal fluid, the limit of detection increased to 20 μM due to the background signal of ionic content of the cerebrospinal fluid. The FAST showed a signal stability of 226 μV/h over 24 h. We show that FAST can measure ACh dynamics in sheep brain tissue and sheep brain homogenate after ACh spiking. FAST is the first flexible electrochemical sensor for monitoring ACh dynamics in the brain.

Solid Contact Potentiometric Sensors Based on a New Class of Ionic Liquids on Thiacalixarene Platform

New solid-contact potentiometric sensors have been developed for hydrogen phosphate recognition on the basis of ionic liquids containing tetrasubstituted derivatives of thiacalix[4]arene in cone and 1,3-alternate conformations with trimethyl- and triethylammonium fragments at the lower rim substituents. The recognition of selected anions including carbonate, hydrogen phosphate, perchlorate, oxalate, picrate, and EDTA was conducted using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy with ferricyanide redox probe. For the potentiometric sensor assembling, the ionic liquids were stabilized by multiwalled carbon nanotubes and carbon black deposited on the glassy carbon electrode. The influence of support, steric factors and modification conditions on the sensor performance has been investigated. As was shown, potentiometric sensors developed make it possible to selectively determine hydrogen phosphate anion within the concentration range from 1 × 10⁻² to 1 × 10⁻⁶ M and limit of detection of 2 × 10⁻⁷−1 × 10⁻⁶ M with unbiased selectivity coefficients varied from 1.2 × 10⁻¹ to 1.0 × 10⁻⁸ (carbonate, acetate, oxalate, succinate, glutharate, glycolate, and malonate anions).