Enhanced split-type photoelectrochemical aptasensor incorporating a robust antifouling coating derived from four-armed polyethylene glycol.

Antifouling biosensors capable of preventing protein nonspecific adhesion in real human bodily fluids are highly sought-after for precise disease diagnosis and treatment. In this context, an enhanced split-type photoelectrochemical (PEC) aptasensor was developed incorporating a four-armed polyethylene glycol (4A-PEG) to construct a robust antifouling coating, enabling accurate and sensitive bioanalysis. The split-type PEC system involved the photoelectrode and the biocathode, effectively separating signal converter with biorecogniton events. Specifically, the TiO2 electrode underwent sequential modification with ZnIn2S4 (ZIS) and polydopamine (PDA) to form the PDA/ZIS/TiO2 photoelectrode. The cathode substrate was synthesized as a hybrid of N-doped graphene loaded with Pt nanoparticles (NG-Pt), and subsequently modified with 4A-PEG to establish a robust antifouling coating. Following the anchoring of probe DNA (pDNA) on the 4A-PEG-grafted antifouling coating, the biocathode for model target of cancer antigen 125 (CA125) was obtained. Leveraging pronounced photocurrent output of the photoelectrode and commendable antifouling characteristics of the biocathode, the split-type PEC aptasensor showcased exceptional detection performances with high sensitivity, good selectivity, antifouling ability, and potential feasibility.

Physical layer encryption scheme based on cellular automata and DNA encoding by hyper-chaos in a CO-OFDM system.

This study proposes an encryption scheme combining cellular automata (CA) and DNA encoding to improve security of a coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system, wherein key sequences are generated with good randomness and unpredictability by a 4-dimensional hyper-chaotic system. A base scrambling pseudo random binary sequence (PRBS) generated by the CA is introduced, which results in better scrambling effect and randomness in the conventional complex DNA encoding. The randomness, complexity and security of the system is enhanced due to 6 variable keys (key space of ∼10138). An experiment conducted in a 40 GHz 16QAM CO-OFDM system over an 80 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) shows that the authorized user can successfully decrypt the received signal, while the eavesdroppers cannot derive useful information with bit error rate (BER) at approximately 0.5. An allowable optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) penalty of 0.5 dB will be introduced to achieve same BER before and after encryption due to the error propagation of cellular automata.