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A smart dust biosensor powered by kinesin motors

Abstract

Biosensors can be miniaturized by either injecting smaller volumes into micro- and nanofluidic devices or immersing increasingly sophisticated particles known as ‘smart dust’ into the sample. The term ‘smart dust’ originally referred to cubic-millimetre wireless semiconducting sensor devices that could invisibly monitor the environment in buildings and public spaces1, but later it also came to include functional micrometre-sized porous silicon particles used to monitor yet smaller environments2,3. The principal challenge in designing smart dust biosensors is integrating transport functions with energy supply into the device. Here, we report a hybrid microdevice that is powered by ATP and relies on antibody-functionalized microtubules and kinesin motors to transport the target analyte into a detection region. The transport step replaces the wash step in traditional double-antibody sandwich assays. Owing to their small size and autonomous function, we envision that large numbers of such smart dust biosensors could be inserted into organisms or distributed into the environment for remote sensing.

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Figure 1: Concept of a smart dust device using active transport by molecular shuttles.
Figure 2: Experimental results for streptavidin as analyte.
Figure 3: Experimental results for GST as analyte.

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Acknowledgements

This work is part of a collaborative project with G. D. Bachand, V. Vogel, B. Ratna and P. Satir, whose insights and contributions are gratefully acknowledged. Financial support was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Biomolecular Motors Program (Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) FA9550-05-1-0274 and FA9550-05-1-0366) and the University of Florida (UF) Centre for Sensor Materials and Technologies (ONR N00014-07-1-0982). T.F. was partially supported by a Feodor Lynen fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. The authors would also like to thank A. Ogden from the UF Nanofabrication Centre for his advice and support.

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T.F., A.A. and H.H. conceived and designed the experiments. T.F. and A.A. performed the experiments and analysed the data. All authors discussed the results. T.F., A.A. and H.H. co-wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Henry Hess.

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Fischer, T., Agarwal, A. & Hess, H. A smart dust biosensor powered by kinesin motors. Nature Nanotech 4, 162–166 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.393

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