Nanofabrication and Characterization Platform for Novel NanoBiological Architectures

生物电子工程是一个快速发展的跨学科研究和创新领域。将生物聚合物（如蛋白质和DNA分子）与固态电子设备表面结合在一起的新兴技术有望彻底改变生物诊断、医疗仪器、食品和水安全测试技术以及绿色能源收集等应用。特别重要的是，同时也具有挑战性的是，制造出一种设备，这种设备的表面包含纳米级结构，并与生物聚合物结合，这样它们的功能就可以被指导和监控。我在阿尔伯塔大学（University of Alberta）的研究追求的是一种方法的发展，这种方法可以有效地制造和表征新型共轭结构，这种结构将刺激响应聚合物与表面设计相结合，可以非常有效地从光中收集能量，并将这种能量转化为其他形式。这种表面，也被称为等离子基板，涉及纳米级尺寸的微小金属特征。由于等离子体基板能够以不同形式转换光能，因此可以影响其表面生物材料的化学变化。这些活动建立在阿尔伯塔大学独特的仪器基础设施的基础上，也强烈依赖于我们在几个相关学科的早期成就，包括制造尺寸降至10-20纳米的表面纳米结构，在这种纳米结构上固定生物聚合物，以及预测生物分子在需要时是否保持稳定。在这个项目中，我们开发和测试具有比以前更多功能的共轭体系结构。这包括将生物聚合物固定在精心优化尺寸和形状的等离子基板上；利用高灵敏度的表面增强拉曼散射（SERS）技术监测固定化生物聚合物；并结合光催化和电刺激。这种可寻址的共轭纳米生物结构的开发和概念验证演示，同时将生物聚合物保持在其接近天然的环境中，将允许检测和操纵表面固定化生物聚合物的新技术。这些能力是未来许多生物电子和生物电化学设备的基础，我们的工作将为社区提供强大的能力来开发它们。

Bioelectronic engineering is a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary field of research and innovation. Novel emerging technologies allowing integrating biological polymers, such as proteins and DNA molecules, with surfaces of solid-state electronic devices are expected to revolutionize biological diagnostics, medical instrumentation, food and water safety testing techniques, as well as green energy harvesting, to name just a few applications. Particularly important, but also challenging, is to fabricate devices that involve nanoscale-sized structures on the device's surface conjugated with biological polymers in such a way that their function could be both directed and monitored. My research at the University of Alberta pursues a development of methods that allow efficiently fabricating, as well as characterizing, novel conjugate architectures interfacing stimuli-responsive polymers with surfaces designed in such a way that they may very efficiently harvest energy from light, and convert this energy in other forms. Such surfaces, also known as plasmonic substrates, involve tiny metallic features with nanoscale dimensions. Due to their ability to convert energy of light in different forms, plasmonic substrates can influence chemical changes in biological materials on their surface. These activities build upon the unique instrumentation infrastructure of the University of Alberta, and also rely strongly on our earlier achievements in several relevant disciplines, including fabrication of surface nanostructures with dimensions down to 10-20 nm, immobilization of biological polymers on such nanostructures, and predicting whether biological molecules would remain stable when required. In this project, we develop and test conjugate architectures with more functionalities than has been available previously. This involves immobilizing biological polymers on plasmonic substrates of carefully optimized size and shape; monitoring the immobilized biopolymers with a highly sensitive spectroscopy technique known as the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS); and combining this with photocatalytic and electrical stimulation. The development and proof-of-concept demonstration of such addressable, conjugate nano-biological architectures while maintaining the biopolymers in their near-native environment, would allow for novel techniques of detecting as well as manipulating surface-immobilized biopolymers. Such capabilities are basic for numerous biolelectronic and bioelectrochemical devices of the future, and our work will provide the community with a powerfully enhanced capacity to develop them.