Biophysical investigations on additive manufactured nanoscale biosensors and biological materials
Abstract
New tools and innovative characterization techniques must be designed to study natural materials and processes like cell signalling, neurons, nervous tissues because of limitations of present technologies. Recently, the proposing team has demonstrated that DNA can be successfully incorporated in a bioelectronic device as an electron-extracting layer, leading to strong improvements in rectifying behaviour (>102), and in photovoltaic response (efficiency increase from 2% to 5%). Building upon this and other recent breakthroughs, the vision of this program is to investigate biological materials and utilize their basic properties to design novel biosensors. Novel in-situ characterization platform will be developed based upon interaction of photons of well-defined wavelength and power density with biological material in cellular architecture. With this platform, it is possible to extract the physical properties (mobility, work function, density of states, electronic levels) by comparing the obtained data with those from complementary measurements and numerical modelling simulations. This new platform will enable us to: 1) unravel the electronic processes that occur in natural materials and living cells, representing a ground-breaking approach to investigate cellular biology, and 2) design biosensor in order to gauge how the biological material is sensitive to external stimuli such as light, temperature, magnetic fields etc. The research approach will utilize different levels of photo-stimulation and semiconductors with different energy levels and binding properties, and a combination of fully solid state and electrolytic based device platforms. Building upon the fundamental understanding of physical and electronic behaviour of natural materials, novel biosensors will be fabricated using nanoprinting techniques and laser annealing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 28, 2018
- Source ID
- FA95501810233
Entities
People
- Shashank Priya
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Pennsylvania State University
- United States Air Force