Weighing of biomolecules, single cells and single nanoparticles in fluid

Thomas P. Burg, Michel Godin, Scott M. Knudsen, Wenjiang Shen, Greg Carlson, John S. Foster, Ken Babcock and Scott R. Manalis ()
Additional contact information
Thomas P. Burg: Department of Biological Engineering,
Michel Godin: Department of Biological Engineering,
Scott M. Knudsen: Department of Biological Engineering,
Wenjiang Shen: Innovative Micro Technology, Santa Barbara, California 93117, USA
Greg Carlson: Innovative Micro Technology, Santa Barbara, California 93117, USA
John S. Foster: Innovative Micro Technology, Santa Barbara, California 93117, USA
Ken Babcock: Innovative Micro Technology, Santa Barbara, California 93117, USA
Scott R. Manalis: Department of Biological Engineering,

Nature, 2007, vol. 446, issue 7139, 1066-1069

Abstract: Nanobalances: weight for it Nanoscale mechanical resonators can be used to measure the mass of particles with extraordinarily high resolution down to the zeptogram scale — that's multiples of 10−21 grams. Such astonishing resolution has not been possible in many practical applications such as medical diagnostics or environmental monitoring, where the presence of fluids dampens the mechanical vibrations that make the system work. Now a team from MIT and the Santa Barbara labs of Innovative Micro Technology and Affinity Biosensors has devised an ingenious way around this problem by placing the fluid inside the resonator. Their vacuum-packaged resonator, with the solution with particles of interest held in microfluidic channels, can weigh single nanoparticles and bacteria at subfemtogram (10−15 g) resolution.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05741 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:446:y:2007:i:7139:d:10.1038_nature05741

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature05741

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().