A nanometre-sized transistor disguised as part of a biological membrane has infiltrated a living cell (pictured) and measured its electrical activity.
Charles Lieber and his colleagues at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created their hairpin-shaped device out of a silicon nanowire with a tiny transistor on the elbow of the bent pin and an electrical contact on each of the pin's two arms. They coated the elbow's tip with phospholipids — the main constituent of cell membranes — tricking the membrane into accepting the tip and pulling it inwards. The authors made a device less than 50 nanometres wide — smaller than many virus particles.
The team poked the probe into a single cultured embryonic chicken heart cell and used it to record a series of voltage peaks corresponding to the beating of the cell.
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Nanobiotechnology: Tiny cell transistor. Nature 466, 904 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466904a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/466904a
