Waste coffee grounds could someday help detect brain waves

A steaming cup of joe will give you a boost in the morning. There is another reason to love the beverage. The first application of used coffee grounds as a coating for sensitive neuroscience measurements was reported today. Scientists could eventually use the material to get a better handle on brain activity and detect minute levels of neurotransmitters.

The results will be presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Coffee grounds can be used to make porous carbon supercapacitors. New research led by the principal investigator has taken recycled coffee waste in a different direction. She and her team have shown that carbon from this waste can be used to detect trace levels of biomolecules. This is the first instance of residual coffee grounds being used for biosensing applications.

I saw papers about using spent grounds to produce porous carbon for energy storage and I thought maybe we could use this material in our work.

Carbon fiber is used in the traditional microelectrodes that neuroscientists use. The process of making them can be lengthy and expensive. Ross would like to make entire electrodes with carbon from coffee grounds because it would be inexpensive and eco-friendly. The researchers adapted the material from the grounds to be a coating for conventional electrodes.

Kamya Lapsley is an undergraduate student at Kent State University and she took the initial challenge. She and other members of the lab heated the coffee grounds in a tube furnace and then added the material to a solution to open up the holes in the structure. The researchers heated the mixture again to remove any leftover nitrogen gas. There was a large amount of porous carbon left. The researchers dipped the carbon fiber electrodes into the water and covered them with a layer of porous carbon that was 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465.

The researchers compared the performance of coated and uncoated electrodes for small amounts of dopamine. They applied a rapidly varying voltage to the electrode to oxidize and reduce dopamine. The technique is fast enough to detect the release of neurotransmitters in the brain. In the presence of dopamine, the researchers found that the coated electrode had a more sensitive surface for dopamine detection than the bare carbon fibers. The porous structure allows more dopamine molecule to participate in the reaction because of the large surface area of the coating. The researchers can use these properties to carry out faster measurements. The group is looking at how the porous coating affects the temporal resolution of the technique.

Next, the team will make carbon fiber electrodes from scratch with porous carbon from waste coffee grounds, which will give the electrodes uniform porosity not just on the surface, but also through and through. Ross predicts that this will boost their detection abilities because the total surface area of the electrode will be exposed to dopamine. Ross plans to put the current coffee-coated electrodes to the test in the brains of rats.

The entire lab seems to love their brew, and there will be no shortage of starting materials to carry out the next stages of the project.

More information: Deriving porous carbon from waste coffee grounds for sensitive dopamine detection with fast-scan cyclic voltammetry, ACS Spring 2022. acs.digitellinc.com/acs/live/22/page/677 Citation: Waste coffee grounds could someday help detect brain waves (2022, March 20) retrieved 20 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-coffee-grounds-brain.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.