Yeast biomimetic iron‑titanium oxides for electrochemical biosensing.

A yeast cell template technology is described to biomimetically synthesize FeTi oxides. The resulting samples, yeast Fe2O3 and yeast Fe2O3/TiO2, are then employed as active materials for the electrochemical detection of cancer-associated miRNAs. For the perfect matched cancer miR-141, electrochemical analysis shows a main oxidation peak at about +0.4 V, along with a reduction peak at about +0.30 V. For the detection of cancer miR-29c, the introduction of the Ti element is found to stabilize the structure of the resulting materials. These results suggest a potential of the biomimetic FeTi oxides as promising sensing materials for miRNA electrochemical biosensors.