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Nature 398, 660-661 (22 April 1999) | doi:10.1038/19412

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Biochemical sensors:  Adapting to nanoscale events

Daniel Branton1 & Jene Golovchenko1

A hallmark of twentieth-century science has been the continual development of experimental strategies to observe individual atomic-scale 'events'. These strategies ultimately rely on significantly amplifying the consequences of a selective microscopic interaction, for example the chemical development of a silver halide grain in a photographic emulsion, the condensation of a droplet around a single ion in a cloud chamber, or the charge amplification in electron multiplier devices.

  1. Daniel Branton and Jene Golovchenko are in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
    e-mail: Email: dbranton@harvard.edu