University of California, Santa Cruz

What if costly, high-end microscopes could be replaced with tiny chips that detect, analyze, and manipulate single biomolecules, in a spirit similar to the replacement of bulky vacuum tubes with planar transistors that created the integrated circuit? Single biomolecules and macromolecular complexes are nanoscale objects, and to build, manipulate and observe objects of this size requires specialized tools. A team at the University of California, Santa Cruz will obtain cutting-edge, versatile nanofabrication equipment and bring together an interdisciplinary group of leading experts and their students spanning the range from device engineering to molecular biology. They will define nanoscale features on integrated optofluidic chips in order to optimize them for single particle studies. These chips will then be the basis for comprehensive studies of properties and functions of some of the basic building blocks of life: ribonucleic acids (RNA) and their macromolecular complexes.