Wearable devices offer a revolutionary approach to ambulatory electrocardiography (ECG) for cardiovascular disease diagnosis. Herein, an adhesive, highly stretchable and conformal (ASC) patch for long‐term ambulatory ECG monitoring is presented. The ASC patch is designed with a “three‐bridge” structure to provide inhomogeneous strain distribution during stretching. Meanwhile, the electrical stability is achieved by stretchable liquid metal interconnects at the domain experiencing larger strain. Moreover, the long‐term usability can be attained by an adhesive layer made of polydopamine/polyacrylamide glycerol–water hydrogel, maintaining good adhesiveness and stretchability for more than two weeks. Altogether, the patch can successfully measure stable high‐quality ECG signals in relaxed, stretched, or underwater conditions. Enhanced mechanical and electrical properties exhibited by our ASC patch confer superior skin‐device interface on either dry or wet conditions than that of current electrodes. The hydrogel‐based patch displays conformal deformation along with the stretched skin. This work provides a scalable prototype for multilead wearable ECG devices and promises new opportunities for medical applications in soft electronics.

Detection of environmental pollutants is crucial to safeguard ecological and public health. Here, we report a modular biosensing approach for the detection of contaminants based on the regulation of a minimal DNA signal amplifier and transducer circuit by allosteric transcription factors and their cognate ligands. We leverage the competition between allosteric proteins and an endonuclease to modulate cascade toehold-mediated strand displacement reactions, which are triggered in the presence of specific effectors and sustained by the endonuclease. We built two optical biosensors for the detection of tetracyclines and macrolides in water using repressors TetR and MphR, respectively. We demonstrate that our minimal, fast, and single-step biosensors can successfully detect antibiotics in nanomolar levels and apply them to report the presence of spiked-in antibiotics in water samples in a matter of minutes, suggesting great potential for monitoring of water contaminants.

Regulatory mechanisms in biological systems are analogous to process control exerted in many chemical and biomolecular engineering processes. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) has been identified as a ubiquitous element for tight regulation of cellular activities, such as gene expression, given its high tunability of structures and functions. Enhanced understanding of interactions of RNA with nucleic acids, proteins, and small molecules has enabled programming of robust gene circuits for detection of specific target analytes and signal transduction. Bottom up approaches in synthetic biology have developed in silico engineered RNA modules to work as biosensors for nucleic acids in vitro detection. In this review, we describe light-up aptamers and toehold switches as exciting examples of RNA engineered modules that were inspired by evolution and process control in biological organisms. We emphasize how the programmability of these elements has empowered the assembly circuitry to sense and compute information relevant for biomedical applications.