Seems to be an interesting, perhaps more realistic approach to advance molecular electronics! This could be a game changer!
"In 1999, Rice University chemist Jim Tour co-founded Molecular Electronics Corporation, a company that aimed to use single molecules to make a new type of electronic memory. ... In a 2000 story in Wired, he foretold a future in which molecular electronics would leapfrog silicon-based circuitry, allowing computer chips to keep getting denser and more powerful. This vision was short-lived: five years later, flash had cornered the memory market, silicon continued to dominate chip technology, and Tour left the molecular electronics business. The once well-funded field nearly collapsed.
Now, the San Diego-based startup Roswell Biotechnologies is hoping to give molecular electronics a second life ...
integrating single molecules into electronic biosensor circuits, an approach it hopes will soon provide a cheap and convenient way to detect viruses, pick up on environmental toxins, and evaluate the effects of pharmaceuticals in real time.
In January, the company reported a crucial advance in the journal PNAS: a set of 16,000 functional molecular biosensors fully integrated with the circuitry of a semiconductor chip. This shows that these chips can be made using existing fabrication methods at a commercial scale and ... they could cost as little as a few dollars per unit. ...
Roswell is not the only company pursuing chip-based biosensors. For instance, Dynamic Biosensors, based in Munich, offers chips with DNA-based sensors that use light. But Roswell’s manufacturing approach produces precise sensors that are flexible enough to envision a “universal biosensor” that can be mass produced with modern chip-making techniques ..."
From the significance section:
"... This report describes a broadly applicable platform for detecting molecular interactions at the single-molecule scale, in real-time, label-free, and potentially highly multiplexable fashion, using single-molecule sensors on a highly scalable semiconductor sensor array chip. Such chips are both practically manufacturable in the near term, and have a durable long-term scaling roadmap, thus providing an ideal way to bring the power of modern chip technology to the broad area of biosensing. This work also realizes a 50-year-old scientific vision of integrating single molecules into electronic chips to achieve the ultimate miniaturization of electronics."
From the abstract:
"... A central conjugation site is used to attach a single probe molecule that defines the target of the sensor. The chip digitizes the resulting picoamp-scale current-versus-time readout from each sensor element of the array at a rate of 1,000 frames per second. This provides detailed electrical signatures of the single-molecule interactions between the probe and targets present in a solution-phase test sample. This platform is used to measure the interaction kinetics of single molecules, without the use of labels, in a massively parallel fashion. To demonstrate broad applicability, examples are shown for probe molecule binding, including DNA oligos, aptamers, antibodies, and antigens, and the activity of enzymes relevant to diagnostics and sequencing, including a CRISPR/Cas enzyme binding a target DNA, and a DNA polymerase enzyme incorporating nucleotides as it copies a DNA template. All of these applications are accomplished with high sensitivity and resolution, on a manufacturable, scalable, all-electronic semiconductor chip device, thereby bringing the power of modern chips to these diverse areas of biosensing."
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