10-04 :: April 2010

nanotimes

News in Brief

cell within an hour or so.” “If the stealth probe will give us a long-term patch clamp, we‘ll really be able to get the ability to watch these net- works over long periods of time, perhaps up to a week,” he said.

“Ideally, what you‘d like to be able to do is have an access port through the cell membrane that you can put things in or take things out, measure electrical currents … basically full control,” said Melosh. “That‘s really what we‘ve shown – this is a platform upon which you can start building those kinds of devices.”

The next step is to demons- trate the functionality of the probe in living cells. Alm- quist and Melosh are now working with human red blood cells and cervical cancer cells, as well as ovary cells from a species of hamster.

Benjamin D. Almquist and Nicholas A. Melosh: Fusion of biomimetic stealth probes into lipid bilayer cores, In: PNAS, Vol. 107(2010), No. 13, March 30, 2010, Pages 5815-5820, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0909250107: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0909250107

http://www.stanford.edu/group/melosh/

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Image: A “stealth” probe sits firmly fused into a cell membrane. The membrane is represented by the small blue spheres, with the hydrophobic portion inside shown by squiggly fine blue lines. The silicon part of the probe is black and the chromium bands that bound the thin gold band are silver-gray. The gold band is obscured by the carbon atoms that are attached to it and that integrate with the hydrophobic part of the membrane. © Benjamin Almquist, Stanford University Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87