Nanomembrane-Based, Thermal-Transport Biosensor for Living Cells
Nanomembrane-Based, Thermal-Transport Biosensor for Living Cells
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DOI：
10.1002/smll.201603080
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发表时间：
2017-02-17
期刊：
影响因子：
13.3
通讯作者：
Ooi, Boon S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
ElAfandy, Rami T.;AbuElela, Ayman F.;Ooi, Boon S.
材料的热传输特性，导电性和扩散性的知识，是生物学，材料科学和工程领域内的几个应用程序的关键。具体而言，微型、柔性、生物集成的热传输传感器有益于多种应用，范围跨越植物生理生态学和癌细胞的热成像和治疗，以及柔性半导体和热电器件中的热耗散。活细胞由于体积小和不规则的曲线形状而带来了额外的挑战。在这里，一种新的方法，同时测量不同材料的热导率和扩散率及其适用性的单电池被证明。这种技术是基于增加声子边界散射率的纳米膜，具有极低的弯曲刚度，诱导相当大的光谱依赖性的带隙发射超过激发激光强度。研究表明，一旦与有机或无机材料接触，纳米膜的发射光谱会根据材料的热扩散率和电导率发生变化。这种基于NM的技术进一步应用于基于其热传输特性区分不同类型和亚型的癌细胞。预计这种新技术能够实现有效的单细胞热靶向，允许更好地建模细胞热分布，并实现基于单细胞热传递特性变化的新诊断技术。
Knowledge of materials' thermal-transport properties, conductivity and diffusivity, is crucial for several applications within areas of biology, material science and engineering. Specifically, a microsized, flexible, biologically integrated thermal transport sensor is beneficial to a plethora of applications, ranging across plants physiological ecology and thermal imaging and treatment of cancerous cells, to thermal dissipation in flexible semiconductors and thermoelectrics. Living cells pose extra challenges, due to their small volumes and irregular curvilinear shapes. Here a novel approach of simultaneously measuring thermal conductivity and diffusivity of different materials and its applicability to single cells is demonstrated. This technique is based on increasing phonon-boundary-scattering rate in nanomembranes, having extremely low flexural rigidities, to induce a considerable spectral dependence of the bandgap-emission over excitation-laser intensity. It is demonstrated that once in contact with organic or inorganic materials, the nanomembranes' emission spectrally shift based on the material's thermal diffusivity and conductivity. This NM-based technique is further applied to differentiate between different types and subtypes of cancer cells, based on their thermal-transport properties. It is anticipated that this novel technique to enable an efficient single-cell thermal targeting, allow better modeling of cellular thermal distribution and enable novel diagnostic techniques based on variations of single-cell thermal-transport properties.