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Biosensors

Magnets tackle kinetic questions

Nature Nanotechnology volume 6, pages 266–267 (2011)Cite this article

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Interactions between biomolecules can be probed with the help of technology that was developed for reading data stored on magnetic disk drives.

Advances in computing power and memory have enabled researchers to handle ever-increasing amounts of data in many areas of science and engineering. In bioinformatics, for example, previously unknown biological interactions have been discovered in the massive datasets gleaned from genomic and proteomic microarrays. It is less well known that advances in computer hardware can also have a vital role in the collection of data. For example, giant magnetoresistive (GMR) wires, which are core components of the read heads for modern hard drives, have been harnessed as transduction elements in various rapid, ultrasensitive and portable biosensor systems1,2,3,4,5. Now, writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Shan Wang and co-workers6 at Stanford University, IBM and MagArray, report that GMR-based sensors can also be used to study protein-binding kinetics, such as antibody–antigen interactions.

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Figure 1: The read heads for most hard drives (centre) rely on GMR wires that contain alternating layers of magnetic and non-magnetic materials (right).

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  1. Shawn P. Mulvaney is in the Chemistry Division, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC 20375, USA,

    Shawn P. Mulvaney

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  1. Shawn P. Mulvaney
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Correspondence to Shawn P. Mulvaney.

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Mulvaney, S. Magnets tackle kinetic questions. Nature Nanotech 6, 266–267 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.67

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2011.67

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