© Weisi Song, Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University
When pushing the boundaries of discovery, sometimes even the most experienced of scientists can get a surprise jolt from a completely unpredictable result.
That was the case for ASU Regents' Professor and biophysicist Stuart Lindsay, who has spent his career building new microscopes that have become the eyes of nanotechnology and next-generation, rapid and low-cost DNA and amino acid readers to make precision medicine more of a reality.
In the process, Lindsay's research team has learned a thing or two about how single molecules behave when tethered between a pair of electrodes, which is the foundation for how his DNA readers work.
The technology, called recognition tunneling, threads single molecules down a nanopore like a thread through the eye of a needle.
As they go down the nano-rabbit hole, electrodes measure the electrical properties of these single DNA or amino acid molecules to determine their sequence identity.
Having spent a considerable amount of time building DNA and amino readers, the thought was to give whole proteins a try. "The technological goal here was, can we use our technology to electronically detect whole proteins," said Lindsay.
Comment: Perhaps the Russians did it, but perhaps we tend to blame the Russians a bit too much. They're not gods y'know!