The Development of Optical Nanosensor Technology for Single Cell Analysis
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| Release | : 2004 |
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Advances in modern biosciences and optical biosensor technology have provided exciting new insights and capabilities. The integration of these fields has witnessed revolutionary advances, which include the development of optical nanosensors. Optical nanosensors are devices based on a direct spatial coupling between biologically active molecules and a signal transducer element interfaced to electronic equipment for signal amplification, acquisition and recording. Optical nanosensors consist of biorecognition molecules covalently immobilized onto the nanotips nanoscale optical fiber that serves as the transducing element. By combining the specificity of biorecognition molecules and the excellent sensitivity of laser-based optical detection, optical nanosensors are capable of detecting and differentiating biochemical constituents of complex systems enabling the provision of sensitive and specific identification of specific molecular events inside living cells. This work explores and focuses on the development and application of novel optical nanosensors for single living cell analysis. In this context, single cell analysis involves the application of optical nanosensor technology to observe and possibly map molecular events inside single living cells. Previous studies have focused on the bulk response of cells and this largely increases the probability of missing critical underlying mechanisms specific to the single cell. The ability to perform single cell analysis can dramatically improve our understanding of basic cellular processes e.g., signal transduction as well as improving our knowledge of the intracellular transport and the fate of therapeutic agents at the single cell level. This is important not only because of the capability to perform minimally invasive analysis, but also to overcome the problem of ensemble averaging. This capability to overcome ensemble averaging has the potential to yield new information that is not available from population averaged cellular measurements. This work involves the development and application of optical nanosensors for specific and sensitive chemical and protein analysis within single living cells. The ability of these sensors to successfully perform chemical and protein analysis at the single cell level, lay in their design specifications, size, specificity, sensitivity and eliminating interferences.
