
via OIST
A small rectangle of pink glass, about the size of a postage stamp, sits on Professor Amy Shen’s desk. Despite its outwardly modest appearance, this little glass slide has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of processes, from monitoring food quality to diagnosing diseases.
The slide is made of a ‘nanoplasmonic’ material — its surface is coated in millions of gold nanostructures, each just a few billionths of a square meter in size. Plasmonic materials absorb and scatter light in interesting ways, giving them unique sensing properties. Nanoplasmonic materials have attracted the attention of biologists, chemists, physicists and material scientists, with possible uses in a diverse array of fields, such as biosensing, data storage, light generation and solar cells.
In several recent papers, Prof. Shen and colleagues at the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), described their creation of a new biosensing material that can be used to monitor processes in living cells.
“One of the major goals of nanoplasmonics is to search for better ways to monitor processes in living cells in real time,” says Prof. Shen. Capturing such information can reveal clues about cell behavior, but creating nanomaterials on which cells can survive for long periods of time yet don’t interfere with the cellular processes being measured is a challenge, she explains.
Counting Dividing Cells
One of the team’s new biosensors is made from a nanoplasmonic material that is able to accommodate a large number of cells on a single substrate and to monitor cell proliferation, a fundamental process involving cell growth and division, in real time. Seeing this process in action can reveal important insights into the health and functions of cells and tissues.
Researchers in OIST’s Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit described the sensor in a study recently published in the journal Advanced Biosystems.
The most attractive feature of the material is that it allows cells to survive over long time periods. “Usually, when you put live cells on a nanomaterial, that material is toxic and it kills the cells,” says Dr. Nikhil Bhalla, a postdoctoral researcher at OIST and first author of the paper. “However, using our material, cells survived for over seven days.” The nanoplasmonic material is also highly sensitive: It can detect an increase in cells as small as 16 in 1000 cells.
The material looks just like an ordinary pieces of glass. However, the surface is coated in tiny nanoplasmonic mushroom-like structures, known as nanomushrooms, with stems of silicon dioxide and caps of gold. Together, these form a biosensor capable of detecting interactions at the molecular level.
Learn more: Nanomushroom Sensors: One Material, Many Applications
The Latest on: Nanoplasmonic materials
- Color sensors based on microlens are cheaper to make on December 5, 2018 at 3:57 am
Their fabrication involves the use of special nanoplasmonic structures ... which focus the light on the color filters in a targeted manner. The material used by Fraunhofer ISC to fabricate the arrays ... […]
- Insplorion reaches collaboration agreement with Littelfuse for battery sensor technology on July 16, 2018 at 1:22 am
Insplorion AB is a Swedish company that develops and sells its own technology NanoPlasmonic Sensing (NPS), within two business areas, Instruments and Sensor Systems. Within Instruments, the company se... […]
- Power/Performance Bits: April 3 on April 2, 2018 at 5:00 pm
The optical disk uses a novel nanoplasmonic hybrid glass matrix. Glass is a highly durable material that can last up to 1000 years and can be used to hold data, but has limited storage capacity becaus... […]
- Nanomushroom sensors—one material, many applications on February 25, 2018 at 4:00 pm
The slide is made of a nanoplasmonic material—its surface is coated in millions of gold nanostructures, each just a few billionths of a square meter in size. Plasmonic materials absorb and scatter lig... […]
- Research Team Achieves On-Demand 3D Nanoprinting of Pure Metal Structures with Direct-Writing Method on October 25, 2017 at 9:09 am
which reveal strong plasmonic activity and pave the way for a new generation of 3D nanoplasmonic architectures that can be printed on-demand.” Fowlkes, the team leader for the ORNL Center for Nanophas... […]
- Revealing the subfemtosecond dynamics of orbital angular momentum in nanoplasmonic vortices on March 16, 2017 at 11:42 am
2 Department of Physics and State Research Center for Optics and Materials Sciences (OPTIMAS), University of Kaiserslautern, Erwin Schroedinger Strasse 46, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany. 3 School of P... […]
- UD laboratory works with Army to detect dangerous chemicals on January 14, 2015 at 6:02 am
8:59 a.m., Jan. 14, 2015--Led by Mark Mirotznik, the Electromagnetic Materials Laboratory at the University of Delaware is working with the Army Research Office to engineer nanoplasmonic surfaces — ma... […]
- A nanoplasmonic sensor detects cancer proteins at the single-molecule level on September 30, 2013 at 12:23 am
The physics behind the phenomenon is known as the reactive sensing principle, 5,6 which states that the shift in the resonance frequency is directly proportional to the amount of adsorbed material and ... […]
- Nanoplasmonic sensing for nanomaterials science and catalysis on May 7, 2012 at 5:00 pm
As a completely new approach to circumvent these limitations, we have developed an optical spectroscopy platform—indirect nanoplasmonic sensing 1 ... By placing INPS sensors at hidden material interfa... […]
- Rainbow-Trapping Scientist Now Strives to Slow Light Waves Even Further on April 30, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Gan and his colleagues created nanoplasmonic structures by making nanoscale grooves in metallic surfaces at different depths, which alters the materials' optical properties. These plasmonic chips prov... […]
via Google News and Bing News