Measurement of the Extracellular pH of Adherently Growing Mammalian Cells with High Spatial Resolution Using a Voltammetric pH Microsensor

There are only a few tools suitable for measuring the extracellular pH of adherently growing mammalian cells with high spatial resolution, and none of them is widely used in laboratories around the world. Cell biologists very often limit themselves to measuring the intracellular pH with commercially available fluorescent probes. Therefore, we built a voltammetric pH microsensor and investigated its suitability for monitoring the extracellular pH of adherently growing mammalian cells. The voltammetric pH microsensor consisted of a 37 μm diameter carbon fiber microelectrode modified with reduced graphene oxide and syringaldazine. While graphene oxide was used to increase the electrochemically active surface area of our sensor, syringaldazine facilitated pH sensing through its pH-dependent electrochemical oxidation and reduction. The good sensitivity (60 ± 2.5 mV/pH unit), reproducibility (coefficient of variation ≤3% for the same pH measured with 5 different microsensors), and stability (pH drift around 0.05 units in 3 h) of the built voltammetric pH sensors were successfully used to investigate the acidification of the extracellular space of both cancer cells and normal cells. The results indicate that the developed pH microsensor and the perfected experimental protocol based on scanning electrochemical microscopy can reveal details of the pH regulation of cells not attainable with pH sensors lacking spatial resolution or which cannot be reproducibly positioned in the extracellular space.