717 Patternable Rough Textured Gold Microwire for Neurochemical Sensing Eva Mutunga 1 and Pawan Tyagi 2 1 Bredesen Center, University of Tennessee, 418 Greve Hall, 821 Volunteer Blvd, Knoxville, TN 37996, U.S.A. 2 Mechanical Engineering Department, University of the District of Columbia, 4200 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington DC, U.S.A. ABSTRACT Understanding spatial and temporal neuronal activities is crucial for finding the cure for brain related ailments and advancement of our knowledge about the brain itself. This paper discusses our recent finding of the patternable rough textured gold microwire for neurochemical sensing. We have successfully fabricated the ~5 μm wide and ~ 60 nm thick gold microwires based electrochemical sensor. We produced these microwires along the edge of lithographically patterned nickel thin film. A nickel thin film edge was shadowed by the photoresist overhang during electrochemical growth only to allow gold deposition along the edges. Our electrochemical growth conditions yielded very rough textured sensor. Rough textured biosensors are highly desirable for increasing surface/volume ratio for efficient electrochemical sensing. These rough-textured microwires were transformed into the functional neurochemical sensor to detect dopamine. Our voltammetry and chronoamperometry studies on rough textured microwires based sensor confirmed the successful detection of dopamine. INTRODUCTION Dopamine has been extensively studied as a result of its multifaceted importance within neurobiological systems. Aside from being a precursor of adrenaline and noradrenaline, dopamine also has an essential role in the neurological reward centers and pathways [1-3]. Some of its notable functions are movement, memory, pleasurable reward, behavior, cognition, attention, sleep, and mood. Dopaminergic neurons in the reward centers and pathways release the particular neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft, which causes a measurable, sub-second change in concentration [4]. Dopamine quantity in the human body is limited. Having adequate levels of dopamine is, therefore, essential to the overall health. Dopamine imbalances and defects in the dopaminergic pathways are associated with neurological disorders and mental illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease, psychosis, ADHD, and drug addiction [5,6]. Novel electrodes bring about a tremendous improvement in the electrochemical recording of neurochemicals by enabling measurements with high spatial resolution and reduced disturbance to the surrounding cells [7, 8]. In addition to revealing electrochemical processes that occur in the nanoscale, microelectrodes offer a means to measure neurotransmitter concentrations around synapses [2]. Nanostructures such as nanowires and carbon nanotubes have been used for neurochemical recording, but these studies have been carried out using nanowire or carbon nanotube clusters where the overall recording dimensions of the probes are several square MRS Advances © 2016 Materials Research Society DOI: 10.1557/adv.2016.31