ABSTRACT

Living cells are associated with electrical characteristics and are thus responsive to, and even generate, electric elds and currents. Knowledge of these electrical properties of cells has led to the development of the eld of bioelectronics. Bioelectronics is the application of electronics to biology and medicine and can be broken down into two categories. Physically interfacing electronic devices with biological systems have led to technologies such as the cardiac pacemaker, implantable electrical bone growth simulators, deep brain simulators, and electrical nerve simulation (Nowak et al. 2011). The other aspect of bioelectronics is electronics for both the detection and characterization of biological materials, such as on the cellular and subcellular level. This can be seen in the example of cell-based biosensors that use live cells as sensing elements to monitor the physiological changes induced by internal aberrations or external stimuli (Asphahani and Zhang 2007).