A small rectangle of pink glass, about the size of a postage stamp, sits on Professor Amy Shen’s desk. Despite its outwardly modest appearance, this little glass slide has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of processes, from monitoring food quality to diagnosing diseases.

The slide is made of a ‘nanoplasmonic’ material — its surface is coated in millions of gold nanostructures, each just a few billionths of a square meter in size. Plasmonic materials absorb and scatter light in interesting ways, giving them unique sensing properties. Nanoplasmonic materials have attracted the attention of biologists, chemists, physicists and material scientists, with possible uses in a diverse array of fields, such as biosensing, data storage, light generation and solar cells.

In several recent papers, Prof. Shen and colleagues at the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), described their creation of a new biosensing material that can be used to monitor processes in living cells.

“One of the major goals of nanoplasmonics is to search for better ways to monitor processes in living cells in real time,” says Prof. Shen. Capturing such information can reveal clues about cell behavior, but creating nanomaterials on which cells can survive for long periods of time yet don’t interfere with the cellular processes being measured is a challenge, she explains.

Image Credit:  OIST

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