Professor Shen and colleagues at the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have created biosensing material that can be used to monitor processes in living cells. One of these 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. The material looks like a normal piece of glass, but it allows cells to survive over long periods of time because it has nanoplasmonic mushroom-like structures, known as nanomushrooms, with stems of silicon dioxide and caps of gold. Thus, it is a biosensor capable of detecting interactions at the molecular level.
Ckick here to see the full length article posted on the OIST website.
For additional information, see the recent aricle in the journal Advanced Biosystems where researchers fromOIST’s Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit described the sensor.