SCIENTIFIC EDUCATIONAL CENTER science idea

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed for the first time, realizing the 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to reach the limits of Moore's Law scaling.
Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and an interdisciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses individual molecules as versatile sensor elements in circuitry to create a programmable biosensor with real-time single molecule sensitivity and unlimited sensor pixel density scalability.
The innovation, which appeared this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will drive progress in a variety of fields that are primarily based on the observation of molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.
"Biology works when individual molecules talk to each other, but our current measurement methods can't detect that," said co-author Jim Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University and a pioneer in molecular electronics. "The sensors we've demonstrated allow for the first time to listen to these molecular communications, allowing new insights into biological information."
The molecular electronics platform consists of a programmable semiconductor chip with a scalable sensor array architecture. Each element of the array consists of an electrical current meter that monitors the current flowing through a precisely engineered molecular wire connected to nanoelectrodes that connect it directly to the circuit.
The sensor is programmed by attaching the desired probe molecule to the molecular wire via a centrally designed conjugation unit. The observed current provides a direct electronic reading of the probe's molecular interactions in real time. These picoamp-scale current versus time measurements are digitally read from the sensor array at 1,000 times per second to capture molecular interaction data with high resolution, accuracy, and throughput.
“The goal of this work is to put biosensing on an ideal technological basis for the future of precision medicine and personal health,” the scientists say.
“This requires not only placing the biosensors on the chip, but also correctly, with the right sensor. We have pre-scaled the sensor element down to the molecular level to create a biosensor platform that combines an entirely new type of real-time single-molecule measurement with a long-term roadmap of unlimited scaling for small, fast, low-cost tests and instruments.”
A new molecular electronics platform detects multi-ohm molecular interactions at the scale of a single molecule in real time.
The PNAS document presents a wide range of probe molecules, including DNA, aptamers, antibodies and antigens, as well as the activities of enzymes relevant to diagnostics and sequencing, including the CRISPR Cas enzyme that binds the target DNA. It illustrates the wide range of applications of such probes, including the potential for rapid COVID testing, drug discovery, and proteomics.
The article also presents a molecular electronics sensor capable of reading a DNA sequence. In this sensor, DNA polymerase, the enzyme that copies DNA, is integrated into the circuit, and the result is a direct electrical observation of the action of this enzyme as it copies a piece of DNA letter by letter.
Unlike other sequencing technologies based on indirect measurements of polymerase activity, this approach provides real-time direct observation of the DNA polymerase enzyme comprising nucleotides. The paper shows how these activity signals can be analyzed with machine learning algorithms so that the sequence can be read.
The study was published in the journal PNAS.
PHOTO: The Roswell Molecular Electronics chip uses individual molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time single molecule sensitivity and unlimited sensor density scalability.
ab-news.ru (Arseny Schukin)

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