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The ability to detect, quickly and reliably, the presence or absence of specific chemicals can be a matter of life or death. Leaks of toxic gases, monitoring of glucose in the bloodstream, testing for harmful compounds in foods, and early alert of chemical and biological warfare agents all require reliable and sensitive sensing devices. While the demand for such devices is ever more urgent, the capability of many relevant enabling technologies to build the devices is also unprecedented. First, much has been learned about the specific recognition of one molecule by another, known as molecular recognition. This phenomenon, fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution, ensures that most biomolecules perform various functions with astonishing accuracy and efficiency. In addition to relying on molecules provided by nature, one can also synthesize molecules to mimic the characteristic of biomolecules, and rapidly find a molecular probe for a particular analyte using combinatorial approaches. Second, microelectronics technology made it possible to fabricate transistors smaller than 100 nm and to integrate millions of them into a functional circuit on a small chip. More recently, the rapid progress in nanofabrication has provided new enabling technologies. Indeed, many ingenious sensing concepts and devices have been proposed and demonstrated in recent years, but building a miniaturized device that can simultaneously detect multiple target molecules, and then process and transmit the signals remains a challenge. The key lies in integrating various enabling technologies into a device, which clearly requires interdisciplinary efforts. In this project, we bring together several enabling technologies in biochemistry, device fabrication and materials processing and characterization, including ones developed in our own labs, to develop an integrated sensor.

• Microfabricated tuning fork sensor arrays
• Nanosensors
• Hybrid electrochemical and conductimetric sensors
• Wireless sensors
 

Fig. 1 An array of nanosensors based on different signal transduction principles.