AVS 45th International Symposium
    Biomaterial Interfaces Group Tuesday Sessions
       Session BI+AS+MM+NS+SS-TuA

Invited Paper BI+AS+MM+NS+SS-TuA5
Sensing and Analyzing Single Molecular Interactions with Microfabricated Devices@footnote 1@

Tuesday, November 3, 1998, 3:20 pm, Room 326

Session: Nanoscale to Mesocale Biomaterial Structures
Presenter: G.U. Lee, Naval Research Laboratory
Authors: J.-B.D. Green, Naval Research Laboratory
G.U. Lee, Naval Research Laboratory
Correspondent: Click to Email
There is an intense effort to create new tools for manipulating and characterizing single macromolecules because of the power that these techniques can bring to the analysis of biological macromolecules. Due to the high force and displacement sensitivity of the atomic force microscope (AFM) it has been used to measure inter- and intramolecular forces between model ligand-receptors, i.e., streptavidin-biotin, complimentary strands of DNA, and biologically relevant supra-molecular structures, i.e. titin. With the success of these measurements, there are efforts to obtain even more detailed force measurements and to establish these techniques in the biotechnology laboratory. Our efforts focus on: 1. Designing force transducers with force (10@super -12@N), time (10@super -5@s) and spatial (10@super -9@m) resolutions that push the thermal noise envelope. 2. Developing immobilization strategies that produce more reliable force measurements. We will discuss two new microfabricated devices under development in our laboratory. The first microfabricated apparatus offers an excellent platform for detailed measurements of intermolecular interactions and possibly even analysis of combinatorial arrays. The second is an ultra-sensitive detector based on piezoresistive force transduction and magnetic microparticles. The future of these and similar devices will be considered. @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@This work has been conducted in collaboration with Alexey Novoradovsky, Jonah Harley, Mohan Natesan, Steven Metzger, David Baselt, and Richard Colton.