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