A Portable Luminometer with a Disposable Electrochemiluminescent Biosensor for Lactate Determination

A hand-held luminometer for measuring electrochemiluminescence (ECL) for lactate determination and based on one-shot biosensors fabricated using screen-printed electrodes is described. The lactate recognition system is based on lactate oxidase and the transduction system consists of electro-oxidation of luminol, with all the reagents immobilized in a Methocel membrane. The membrane composition and reaction conditions have been optimized to obtain adequate sensitivity. The luminometer is based on a large silicon photodiode as detector and includes a programmable potentiostat to initialize the chemical reaction and signal processing circuitry, designed to acquire a low level photocurrent with offset cancelation, low pass filtering for noise attenuation and adjustable gain up to 10(12) V/A. The one-shot biosensor responds to lactate rapidly, with an acquisition time of 2.5 min, obtaining a linear dependence from 8 × 10(−6) to 2 × 10(−4) M, a detection limit of 2.4 × 10(−6) M and a sensor-to-sensor reproducibility (relative standard deviation, RSD) of around 7–10 % at the medium level of the range.