Electropolymerized Porous Polymer Films on Flexible Indium Tin Oxide Using Trifunctional Furan Substituted Benzene Conjugated Monomer for Biosensing

In recent years, conducting polymers are playing a significant role in the field of display devices, transistors, solar cells, sensors, and electrochromic windows due to their outstanding optoelectronic and semiconducting properties due to their conjugated backbone. One potential application that is not as widely explored using these materials is biosensing, where advantage is taken of the porosity that can be generated by the polymerization of a three-dimensional network. There are various approaches for producing conjugated microporous polymers using trifunctional or multifunctional monomers synthesized via chemical or electrochemical methods. In this work, we have used electropolymerization to synthesize conjugated polymer films on a working electrode of flexible indium tin oxide (FITO) using a trifunctional conjugated monomer 1,3,5-tri(furan-2-yl)benzene (TFB). There are several parameters that influence the formation of a porous polymer film, and the most critical ones are substrate conductivity, roughness, method of electropolymerization, and choice of an electrolyte. These porous electropolymerized films were characterized using UV–vis spectroscopy (UV–vis), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), surface profilometry, four-point probe conductivity measurements, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The polymer films that were electropolymerized using chronoamperometry rather than repetitive potential cycling demonstrated a more suitable morphology to trap DNA/RNA analytes for biosensing applications.