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

9980814奥斯汀夫妇提议开发一项开创性的技术，该技术特别利用纳米技术、分离技术中的新物理和单分子分子生物学的组合。他们认为，只有打破常规技术，芯片技术的真正潜力才能被挖掘出来。这一项目的两名首席调查员非常有资格开展这项工作。周星驰教授(电气工程系)是纳米制造技术的世界领导者，是纳米压印光刻技术发展的先驱；罗伯特·奥斯汀教授(物理系)是分子和细胞生物学中微制造应用的先驱。利用芯片技术对DNA分子进行测序的主要努力集中在硅片表面毛细管电泳道的收缩上。这项技术的问题是，如果没有在芯片上显式地改变分子被分离的基本聚合物物理，器件的分辨率就会受到晶片上通道长度较短的限制。换句话说，这些努力并没有充分利用平版印刷技术为富有想象力的设计师提供的设计自由。芯片技术的一个更强大的方面也是利用纳米工程和纳米压痕平版技术以大规模并行的方式进行单分子基因组分析的可能性。拟议的工作包括3个相关项目：(1)纳米制造特征间距为30-600毫微米的障碍阵列，用于构建用于分离寡核苷酸的合成凝胶；(2)纳米制造不对称阵列，使用纠偏布朗运动连续分离生物分子；(3)用于标记基因组DNA超高空间读数的近场激发狭缝和通道的纳米制造。这一建议为生物分子分离和单分子测序的芯片纳米结构工程提供了下一步。所描述的技术可能成为芯片生物实验室未来纳米生物学和纳米工程进化的基础。*

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.***