Development of Nanowire Needle/Electrode for Site-Specific Delivery of Bio-Probes for Intracellular Living Cell Studies

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0933223YuThis NSF award by the Biosensing /CBET program supports work by Professor Yu at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a set of robust, functional and readily-applicable nanowire needles/electrodes and a novel and powerful method for direct delivery of a trace but controlled amount of probes, such as QDs, nanoparticles and molecular probes, into the specific compartments in the same cell or different cells with minimal intrusiveness, bypassing the endocytic pathways.More specifically, a new nanofabrication strategy will be applied for the practical and economical fabrication of the nanowire needle/electrode so to make it compatible with the general practice in bioscience laboratory and readily adaptable for broad use. Thiol-based conjugation chemistry for attaching probes onto nanowire needle/electrode surfaces will be designed and later exploited for realizing near instantaneous and targeted release of the attached probes inside cells or sub-cellular structures. We will further demonstrate the site specific delivery of magnetic nanoparticles and the intracellular mechanical studies with magnetic twisting cytometry to determine heterogeneity of stress propagation, important for understanding mechanotransduction pathways of cells. The development represents thus a potentially transformational improvement over the existing methods, and can open up novel venues to conjure innovative strategies, which otherwise would be impractical or even impossible, for the advanced biological studies of living cells. New tools developed in this proposal will be made available for members in the research community to significantly benefit the expanded studies of diversified and fundamental problems in cell biology. The method and technology developed in this project are also appealing subjects for the education of students and the public.