MRI: Acquisition of a Nanomanipulation Device for Biological Electronic and Optoelectronic Samples and Devices

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This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award provides funds for the acquisition of a Zyvex S100 nanomanipulator, a palm-sized device designed to be used inside a scanning electron microscope. This equipment will be used to support research on the following technologies: 1) manipulation of individual protein structures such as those consisting of collagen with dimensions on the order of 50 nanometers in diameter and 0.1 to 100 millimeters in length, 2) positioning small-scale instruments to investigate how size affects mechanical and electrical properties in structures such as nanowires, 3) manipulation of nanotube-enhanced biological tissues, 4) microfabrication of optoelectronic devices, 5) local gating of nanowire devices, and 6) general nanofiber synthesis. The device is ideally suited for an academic environment due to its user-friendly joystick interface which will allow students to quickly appreciate and master techniques for manipulating matter at a scale smaller than is visibly resolvable.The Zyvex S100 will enable research in the fields of nanoscale tissue engineering, computer engineering, and aerospace engineering. It will enable researchers to test hypotheses regarding the behavior of healthy, diseased, and engineered biological tissue. Specifically it will enable current and future researchers to look at how nature arrived at the current configuration of matter in living systems, guide pathologists toward solutions for correcting disease at the molecular level, and aid tissue engineers working at the scale at which living systems first evolved and self-assembled. The Zyvex S100 will facilitate the building of smaller, faster, cheaper devices, such as those constructed from metallic or polymer nanowires, which will impact fields as diverse as computing, biochemical mass sensing, and aerospace engineering where speed and precision are critical. The device will help to enable the creation of large-scale biological tissues with tailored material properties. The device will also be essential to the fabrication of devices to record disease-related elevated pressures within living systems.