XYZ on a Chip: Engineering of Innovative Molecular Sieves on a Chip by Nanoprint Lithography

9980814奥斯汀PI的建议，开发一种开拓性的技术，利用专门的纳米技术，新的物理分离技术和单分子分子生物学的组合。 他们认为，只有打破常规技术，才能发挥芯片技术的真正潜力。 该项目的两名主要研究人员完全有资格开展这项工作。 周星驰教授（电机工程系）是纳米纤维技术的世界领导者，并开创了纳米压印光刻的发展，而罗伯特奥斯汀教授（物理系）在利用芯片技术进行DNA分子测序方面，大多数的努力都集中在将毛细管电泳通道缩小到硅晶片的表面。 这种技术的问题在于，如果没有在芯片上明确地产生分子被分级的基本聚合物物理学的变化，则器件的分辨率受到晶片上通道的短长度的限制。 换句话说，这些努力没有充分利用光刻技术提供给富有想象力的设计者的设计自由度。 芯片技术的一个更强大的方面是利用纳米工程和纳米压印光刻技术以大规模并行的方式进行单分子基因组分析的潜力，拟议的工作包括三个相关的项目：（1）具有30-600纳米特征间距的障碍阵列的纳米芯片，用于构建用于分离寡核苷酸的合成凝胶;（2）不对称阵列的纳米纤维，其使用整流布朗运动用于生物分子的连续分级;（3）近场激发狭缝和通道的纳米纤维，标记的基因组DNA的高空间阅读。该提议提供了芯片上纳米结构工程的下一步，用于生物分子的分级分离和生物分子的测序。单分子 所描述的技术可能成为未来纳米生物学和芯片生物实验室纳米工程的基础。

9980814AustinThe PI's propose to develop a pioneering technology which exploits specifically a combination of nanotechnology, new physics in fractionation technology and single-molecule molecular biology. They believe that only by breaking away from conventional techniques can the true potential of chip technology be exploited. The two principle investigators for this project are superbly qualified to carry out this work. Professor Stephen Chou (Department of Electrical Engineering) is a world leader in nanofabrication technologies and has pioneered the development of nanoimprint lithography while Professor Robert Austin (Department of Physics) has been a pioneer in the applications of microfabrication in molecular and cellular biology.Most efforts at using chip technology to do sequencing of DNAmolecules have concentrated on the shrinking of capillary electrophoresis channels onto the surface of silicon wafer. The problem with this technology is that without creating explicitly on the chip a change in the basic polymer physics by which the molecules are fractionated the resolving power of the devices is limited by the short length of the channels on the wafer. In other words, these efforts do not take full advantage of the design freedom that lithographic techniques offer to an imaginative designer. A more powerful aspect of chip technology is also the potential to do single molecule genomic analysis in a massively parallel manner using nanoscale engineering and nanoimprint lithography.The proposed work consists of 3 related projects: (1) nanofabrication of obstacle arrays with characteristic spacings of 30-600 manometers to be used for the construction of synthetic gels for fractionation of oligonucleotides; (2) nanofabrication of asymmetrical arrays which use rectified brownian motion for the continuous fractionation of biological molecules; (3) nanofabrication of near-field excitation slits and channels for ultra-high spatial reading of tagged genomic DNA.This proposal offers the next step forward in the engineering of nanostructures on chip for the fractionation of biological molecules and the sequencing of single molecules. The technology described could become the basis for the future evolution of nanobiology and nanoengineering of a biology lab on a chip.***