Prof Luisa Torsi

CPE Keynote Seminar with Prof Luisa Torsi of the Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro.

Sensing at the zeptomolar concentration level with large area bioelectronic interfaces

Nanosized interfaces have been the favoured route to single-molecule detections so far. However, because of the so-called diffusion-barrier issue, such near-field approaches, encompassing nano-wire transistors but also nanopores and many others, are, not able to detect at concentrations lower than nanomolar. Bioelectronic field-effect transistors endowed with large-area (mm2 wide) detecting interfaces, are perceived as unsuited too, because the footprint of a single molecule is negligible when compared to a large detecting interface. This is challenging as it would be like detecting a single droplet impacting on a kilometer-wide surface. However, many different groups have published data proving that field-effect large-area biosensors can detect at limit-of-detection of femtomolar and below.

Moreover, these single-molecule large-area bioelectronic based technologies can involve small readers, are fast, easy to operate directly in the fluid to be analyzed, and the electronic outputs are already in a convenient digital form so that an easy transfer to app is possible. Moreover, they can be fabricated by cost-effective technologies including printing and other direct-writing processes. Hence, ultrasensitive large area bioelectronic sensors are likely to have a bright future in healthcare. This lecture will give an overview of this field, discussing device architectures, materials used, and target analytes that can be selectively detected as well as the sensing mechanisms.

References

– The 2021 flexible and printed electronics roadmap, Yvan Bonnassieux at al. Flexible and Printed Electronics, volume 6 (2), article number: 023001 (2022) DOI: 10.1088/2058-8585/abf986

– Electrolyte-gated transistors for enhanced performance bioelectronics, Fabrizio Torricelli et al. 

Nature Reviews Methods Primers, volume 1, Article number: 66 (2021) DOI:10.1038/s43586-021-00065-8

Luisa Torsi

Prof Luisa TorsiLuisa Torsi received her Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Bari in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the same institution in 1993. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Bell Labs from 1994 to 1996. In 2005 and 2006 she was invited professor at the University of Anger and Paris 7, respectively. Since 2005 she is a full professor of chemistry at the University of Bari and since 2017 she is an adjunct professor at the Abo Academy University in Finland.

In 2010 she has been awarded the Heinrich Emanuel Merck prize for analytical sciences, this marking the first time the award is given to a woman. Prof. Luisa Torsi is also the winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2021 (https://www.wilhelmexner.org/en/). The medal has been awarded since 1921 by the Austrian Association of Industries to celebrate excellence in research and science and as many as 23 Nobel prize winners have been awarded too. She is also the recipient, at the British Library in London, of the 2015 main overall platinum prize of the Global-Women Inventors and Innovators Network. The IUPAC – International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry awarded her with the 2019 Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. The analytical chemistry division of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS) conferred her the Robert Kellner Lecturer 2019.

Since 2020 she has been appointed National Representative for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action of Horizon Europe by the Italian Minister for Education and Research. She is also past president of the European Material Research Society being the first women to serve on this role. She has been also elected 2017 Fellow of the Material Research Society, for pioneering work in the field of organic (bio) electronic sensors and their use for point-of-care testing.

Awarded research funding for over 26 million € in thirteen years, comprises several European contracts as well as national and regional projects. She is coordinating the “Single molecule bio-electronic smart system array for clinical testing – SiMBiT” a H2020-ICT-2018-2020 research and innovation action financed with over 3 M€. The PRIN 17 national project “ACTUAL: At the forefront of Analytical ChemisTry: disrUptive detection technoLogies to improve food safety (2017RHX2E4)” is also coordinated by Torsi. She has also coordinated a “European Industrial Doctorate” Marie Curie project in collaboration with Merck and was principal investigator in a Marie Curie ITN. She has also coordinated a Marie Curie ITN European network, several national PRIN projects, and was principal investigator in an ICT STREP proposal. She has also been the scientific coordinator of a Structural Reinforcement PON Project awarded to UNIBA for 2012-2014 and is engaged with a number of other Structural Reinforcement PON projects.

Torsi has authored almost 230 ISI papers, including papers published in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, Advanced Materials, Scientific Reports, and is co-inventor of several international awarded patents. Her works gathered almost 13.500 Google scholar citations resulting in an h-index of 55. She has given more than 170 invited lectures, including almost 50 plenary and keynotes contributions to international conferences.

Prof. Torsi is committed to the role of model for younger women scientists. She has been giving several talks on this topic such as a TEDx talk. Prof. Torsi is one of the 100Experts (https://100esperte.it) a project led by Fondazione Bracco comprising an online databank with the names and CVs of female experts in STEM, a sector historically underrepresented by women but a strategic one for the economic and social development of Italy. In a recent campaign to foster the idea of gender equality in science among children, prof. Torsi was featured in a story of TOPOLINO (Italian comic digest-size series of Disney comics), as “Louise Torduck”, a successful female scientist of the Calisota valley.