Lab talk
May 6, 2010
Nanosyringe arrays made from core-shell nanowires
Lund University researchers have fabricated nanosyringes in semiconductor materials on planar substrates, opening up a route for direct controlled injection of molecules into large numbers of individual cells. The functionality of the nanosyringes was demonstrated by electrophoretically transporting DNA through the nanotubes from one side of the substrate to the other.
Using the cleanroom facilities at the Lund Nanolab, Sweden, the nanosyringes were produced with precisely controlled dimensions by aerosol deposition of catalytic gold dots and subsequent core-shell epitaxial growth of nanowires by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy.
To form the nanotubes, the sacrificial GaAs cores were etched, leaving the hollow AlInP shells attached to the GaAs substrate. In a second step, the GaAs substrate was etched to connect the nanosyringes to the back side of the device, leaving an array of nanosyringes on a thin polymer-film membrane. The small size of the nanowires minimizes the amount of disruption to the sample under test.
The next step is to use the nanowires to inject selected molecules into cells for controlled chemical perturbation. Another interesting application is to instead aspirate material from the inside of the cell – essentially, to take a small biopsy for further analysis.
More details can be found in the journal Nanotechnology.
About the author
Christelle Prinz is a research scientist at the Division of Solid State Physics, Lund University. She uses semiconductor nanowires as her main tool and works closely with biologists and medical researchers to address important questions in the fields of mechanotransduction, nanosafety and brain-machine interface. Jonas Tegenfeldt is a group leader at the Division of Solid State Physics, Lund University, and at the Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg. His research interests are currently focused on the development of tools for single-cell biology, including DNA analysis in nanochannels and label-free microfluidic particle-sorting schemes.
