Impedance Sensors and Their Biological Applications

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is dedicated to perspectives of impedance measurement in medicine, biotechnology, agriculture and food processing. Nowadays, impedance measurement no longer requires sophisticated equipment operated by specially trained personnel. However, with the availability of handheld devices or miniaturized instrumentation such as lab-on-a-chip applications, new ideas for economic breakthrough of this well-established technique come up, but new problems arise as well. To show the perspectives of impedance measurements in all areas of life science, original solutions to overcome bottlenecks, as well as upcoming technological challenges, we accept original articles, reviews and technical reports.

The electrical impedance is the physical phenomenon hindering electric current flow through a material in the presence of an outer electric field. Having materials with different behaviors, electrical energy can be turned into heat or stored in polarizing structures. Characteristic polarization effects are distributed over orders of magnitude, from mHz (diffusion phenomena), kHz (membrane polarization) to GHz (molecular polarization), which requires a large variety of instrumentation.

A fast characterization of cell-based material, either with considerable Faradaic current (impedance spectroscopy) or with overwhelming displacement current (dielectric spectroscopy), is the basis for emerging applications such as tissue discrimination or monitoring of cellular growth in biotechnological applications. Since cell membranes play a major role in food quality, impedance measurement is an attractive technique for quality assessment of cellular-based food material as well as non-food material. It is especially interesting for the monitoring of disintegration or extraction processed in food industry. In much smaller dimensions, viability and state of cells are tested in self-contained lab-on-a-chip devices. If biosensors are used, impedance measurement is an attractive transducer for reading out biochemical or biological signals.

The fast development, especially of instrumentation and methods during the last few decades, poses questions for future guidance of this field. What applications are proposed but not developed yet because of missing technical solutions? Where is the optimum between cheap on one side and precise on the other? Are single-use devices advisable? Where are the current limits for multi-channel devices? What limits the speed of impedance measurements? What are the perspectives in using artificial intelligence for improving selectivity of impedance measurements?

You are invited to share your ideas with us participate to this Special Issue with your latest developments, new ideas but also with critical thoughts to lead the way to new exciting applications.

If you are interested in submitting a contribution or if you have further questions, please contact me.

If you want to learn more information or need any advice, you can contact the Special Issue Editor Jessica Zhou via <[email protected]> directly.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Biosensors is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• impedance measurement
• impedance tomography
• electrochemical measurement
• fast methods
• multi-channel systems
• instrumentation
• algorithms
• dielectric spectroscopy
• lab-on-a-chip
• electrode functionalization
• time domain
• frequency domain
• real-time processing
• bio-sensor