Intra-Cellular Plasmonic System for Neurons, Exosomes and Animal Cellular Studies

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Even though Concordia houses various state-of-the-art research facilities, a number of crucial studies in the areas of cellular interactions with the nano particles are currently limited due to the dire need for a highly specialized high-resolution sub cellular plasmonic system. Such an equipment would enhance ongoing research on developing of more reliable models and design methods by reducing the degree of uncertainty related to nano-bio interactions and plasmonic sensing methods. The Hyperspectral Imaging system (HIS System 2.7) from Cytoviva offers this leading-edge capacity. No similar equipment is available at Concordia or known partner institutions. Acquiring this equipment would not only advance effective collaboration between engineers, biologists and physicists for future convergence but would also sustain leading-edge research success, strengthen training goals, enhance quality of dissertations, and shorten graduation time. We believe that the understanding of the influence of nano materials on cellular biology is fundamentally critical to the realization of micro or micro-nano integrated devices for biological, cellular and molecular studies. This essential research is complementary to both our engineers and physicists working in the area of microsystems, microfluidics, application of micro-nano integrated systems for bio and chemical applications, as well as for our biologists working in characterizing cellular and molecular interactions. Current research, involving the imaging of cells and tissues and monitoring of metabolic activities, is being done at Concordia to develop microsystems for bio applications including diagnosis of growth hormones in milk and cancer cells. However, the incapability of looking closely at the nano cellular plasmonic interactions is a major setback. The requested equipment surmounts this obstacle by permitting observation of thin sections of biological samples and greatly advancing critical ongoing cellular studies on human cancerous cells and neuron cells. Housed in the optical-bio microsystems lab, the system will be open to on-site and other inter-institutional collaborations across Canada including McGill, UdeM, ETS and École Polytechnique.