ASU & Motorola team on nanotube breakthrough

[nanoorg]

Motorola Labs and Arizona State University today announce a key advancement in the use of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWNTs) in Field Effect Transistors (FETs) to sense biological and chemical agents. Together, the research teams have developed a method to functionalize SWNTs with peptides to produce low-power SWNT-FETs that are highly sensitive and can selectively detect heavy metal ions down to the parts-per-trillion level.

Researchers have successfully tuned SWNT-FETs to sense specific agents by applying a peptide-functionalized polymer coating that does not affect their ability to transmit electrical signals. This developing sensor technology could be used to monitor a host of environmental and health issues including air and water quality, industrial chemicals and biological agents.

“Our sensor is based on the unique properties of peptides and carbon nanotubes. Peptides can be used to recognize and detect various chemical species with astonishing sensitivity and selectivity while carbon nanotubes are known for their unique electronic properties,” said Nongjian Tao, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. “The combination of the two allows us to quickly convert the recognition events of the peptides into an electronic signal.”

This work is reported in a paper co-authored by Arizona State University and Motorola entitled “Tuning the Chemical Selectivity of SWNT-FETs for Detection of Heavy-Metal Ions” that will be published in the journal Small. An early view of the article is available on the journal’s website.

Researchers will now investigate the sensing of other analytes and the feasibility of multi-analyte detection with selective sensing libraries.


Source : http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/


This story was first posted on 8th September 2006.