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Nano-pen prints polymers

31 May 2007

Researchers in Israel and France have devised a new technique to make molecularly imprinted polymers using a nanofountain pen. The method paves the way to highly stable nanoarrays for multi-analyte detection. Integrating the polymeric receptor structures with fluid handling and reading systems could also help make lab-on-a-chip devices, says the team.

Micro- and nano-biochips could expand the use of arrayed biosensors in applications such as point-of-care clinical testing, environmental monitoring and homeland security. Normally, these biochips employ enzymes or antibodies as sensors but these molecules can be unstable. Moreover, a natural receptor for a particular target may not always exist. Scientists would therefore like to create new, tailor-made receptors for particular molecular targets.

Levi Gheber's team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, together with Karsten Haupt's group at the Compiègne University of Technology, have now shown that they can do just this. Anne-Sophie Belmont, in Haupt's group, and colleagues made single nanostructures with molecular imprints that can be positioned with high precision using a nanofountain pen. The pen is a hollow glass capillary drawn into a very sharp tip with an aperture of just a few hundreds of nanometres.

The "ink" – which can be proteins, polymers, DNA and enzymes – only flows out of the tip of the nanopipette when it is in contact with a surface to deposit miniscule amounts of solution. The pipette is mounted as the probe of an atomic force microscope (AFM) and its position is controlled with nanometre precision.

MIP

Using their technique, the Israel scientists have shown that they can print proteins, enzymes and polymers onto glass, gold-coated and silicon substrates. "In principle, the nanofountain pen can print almost anything on anything," explained Gheber.

The device can also print without lifting the pen off the substrate. Indeed, the researchers wrote the word "MIP" (for molecularly imprinted polymers) just to demonstrate this point (see figure). Moreover, the amount of "ink" in the pen's reservoir is practically unlimited at these scales.

Gheber told nanotechweb.org that the work paves the way to making nanoarrays that can detect multiple analytes based on MIPs that have high stability compared to biological receptors. The arrays can be imprinted with target molecules for which natural receptors may not exist. "Integrating polymeric receptor structures with fluid handling and reading systems (that are also polymer-based) could tremendously advance the realization of lab-on-chip devices," added Gheber.

The team is now working on printing MIPs that can detect several analytes on the same array. It also hopes to develop label-free detection techniques for binding on such small MIP structures.

The researchers reported their work in Appl. Phys. Lett..

About the author

Belle Dumé is contributing editor at nanotechweb.org

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Compiègne University of Technology

Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Pure and Applied Biochemistry at Lund University, Sweden

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Appl. Phys. Lett. 90 193101

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Author

Belle Dumé

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