Related papers: Screening-Limited Response of NanoBiosensors
Under many conditions, biomolecules and nanoparticles associate by means of attractive bonds, due to hydrophobic attraction. Extracting the microscopic association or dissociation rates from experimental data is complicated by the…
Nanophotonics has become a key enabling technology in biomedicine with great promises in early diagnosis and less invasive therapies. In this context, the unique capability of plasmonic noble metal nanoparticles to concentrate light on the…
Recent experiments show that the relative dielectric constant $\epsilon$ of water confined to a film of nanometric thickness reaches a strikingly low value of 2.1, barely above the bulk's 1.8 value for the purely electronic response. We…
How cells reliably infer information about their environment is a fundamentally important question. While sensing and signaling generally start with cell-surface receptors, the degree of accuracy with which a cell can measure external…
Accurate sensing of chemical concentrations is essential for numerous biological processes. The accuracy of this sensing, for small numbers of molecules, is limited by shot noise. Corresponding theoretical limits on sensing precision, as a…
A microscopic, non-local response theory is developed to model the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with inhomogeneous nano-scale clusters. The breakdown of classical continuum-field Mie theory is demonstrated at a critical…
The investigation of ultrafast electronic and structural dynamics in low-dimensional systems like nanowires and two-dimensional materials requires femtosecond probes providing high spatial resolution and strong interaction with small volume…
In this paper, we consider the diffusive molecular communication channel between a transmitter nano-machine and a receiver nano-machine in a fluid environment. The information molecules released by the transmitter nano-machine into the…
Single molecule detection has revolutionised the fields of chemistry and biology by offering powerful ways to study individual molecules under different scenarios. Nanophotonic structures, including plasmonic antennas, significantly…
The biofunctionalization of nanoelectromechanical structures is critical for the development of new classes of biosensors displaying improved performances and higher-level of integration. We propose a modified microcontact printing method…
Electrochemical phenomena in biology often unfold in confined geometries where micrometer- to millimeter-scale domains coexist with nanometer-scale interfacial diffuse charge layers. We analyze a model lipid membrane-electrolyte system…
Metallic nanoparticles embedded in stimuli-responsive polymers can be regarded as nanoreactors since their catalytic activity can be changed within wide limits: the physicochemical properties of the polymer network can be tuned and switched…
Throughout our history, we, humans, have sought to better control and understand our environment. To this end, we have extended our natural senses with a host of sensors-tools that enable us to detect both the very large, such as the…
We describe a general theory for surface-catalyzed bimolecular reactions in responsive nanoreactors, catalytically active nanoparticles coated by a stimuli-responsive 'gating' shell, whose permeability controls the activity of the process.…
To adapt their behaviour in changing environments, cells sense concentrations by binding external ligands to their receptors. However, incorrect ligands may bind nonspecifically to receptors, and when their concentration is large, this…
We introduce a number of techniques in quantitative convergent-beam electron diffraction under development by our group and discuss the basis for measuring interatomic electrostatic potentials (and therefore also electron densities),…
Proteins are the active working horses in our body. These biomolecules perform all vital cellular functions from DNA replication and general biosynthesis to metabolic signaling and environmental sensing. While static 3D structures are now…
Molecular self-assembly, the function of biomembranes, and the performance of organic solar cells rely on molecular interactions on the nanoscale. The understanding and design of such intrinsic or engineered heterogeneous functional soft…
Label-free biosensors are important tools for clinical diagnostics and for studying biology at the single molecule level. The development of optical label-free sensors has allowed extreme sensitivity, but can expose the biological sample to…
The kinetic processes in nanoparticle-based catalysis are dominated by large fluctuations and spatiotemporal heterogeneities, in particular for diffusion-influenced reactions which are far from equilibrium. Here, we report results from…