Gregory Timp,
Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Electrical Engineering & Systems Biology,
The University of Notre Dame
Gregory Louis Timp received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 working with Mildred Dresselhaus. After a post-doc at IBM with Alan Fowler, he joined Bell Laboratories in 1988, where he engaged in research on nanostructure physics. In 2010, he joined the faculty of Notre Dame to pursue nano-biotechnology with an appointment jointly in Biological Sciences and Electrical Engineering. He is the Keough-Hesburgh professor of Engineering and Systems Biology. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a Fellow of the American Physical Society; and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He has published over 150 articles in scientific journals and holds 10 patents.
Silicon Nanotechnology Meets Biology (Smaller and Wetter is Better)
Tuesday, 5 June 2018 at 09:30
Add to Calendar ▼2018-06-05 09:30:002018-06-05 10:30:00Europe/LondonSilicon Nanotechnology Meets Biology (Smaller and Wetter is Better)Point-of-Care Diagnostics and Biosensors Europe 2018 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
According to Moore’s law, the scaling of silicon integrated circuits is
supposed to reach the 5 nm-node sometime after 2020, although the
schedule is still problematic due to the astronomical cost and
atomically precise line-rules. On the other hand, biology has been
performing cost-effectively using proteins the size of 5 nm (and
smaller) that fold with atomic precision for 4.28 billion years now—it
is a robust and proven technology, albeit wet. In this talk, it is
argued that there is still “plenty of room at the bottom” for improving
performance if silicon nanotechnology is adapted to biology. With
silicon nanotechnology it is now within our grasp to create an interface
to biology on a nanometer-scale. Three examples of such interfaces are
proffered. The first is a liquid flow cell that works like an envelope
made from 30 nm-thick silicon nitride membranes, which can hold and
sustain living cells in medium and yet fits inside a Scanning
Transmission Electron Microscope (STEM). In a STEM, the liquid cell can
be used to visualize and track live cell physiology like a phage
infecting a bacterium with nucleic acids at 5 nm resolution. The second
is a nanometer-diameter pore sputtered through a silicon nitride
membrane 10-nm-thick that can be used to transfect cells precisely with
nucleic acids to affect gene expression in them and, under different
bias conditions, detect protein secretions from single cells with single
molecule sensitivity. The secretions inform on the cell phenotype and
offer a molecular diagnosis of disease. Finally, the third interface is a
sub-nanometer-diameter pore, which is about the size of an amino acid
residue, in either silicon dioxide or silicon nitride membranes ranging
from 6 to 10 nm-thick. Sub-nanopores like this have been used to read
the primary structure of a protein, i.e. the amino acid sequence, with
low fidelity, but with single molecule sensitivity, vastly outstripping
the sensitivity of conventional methods for sequencing such as mass
spectrometry. Taken altogether, the prospects are dazzling for a new
type of integrated circuit that incorporates biology with
state-of-the-art silicon electronics.
Add to Calendar ▼2018-06-05 00:00:002018-06-06 00:00:00Europe/LondonPoint-of-Care Diagnostics and Biosensors Europe 2018Point-of-Care Diagnostics and Biosensors Europe 2018 in Rotterdam, The NetherlandsRotterdam, The NetherlandsSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com