Imagine being able to test your food in your very own kitchen to quickly determine if it carried any deadly microbes.
Research conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and now being commercialized by Optokey may make that possible.
Optokey, a startup based in Hayward, California, has developed a miniaturized sensor based on Raman spectroscopy that can quickly and accurately detect or diagnose substances at a molecular level. “Our system can do chemistry, biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, clinical diagnosis, and chemical analysis,” said company president and co-founder Fanqing Frank Chen. “And our system can be implemented very cheaply, without much human intervention.”
The technology is based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, a technique for molecular fingerprinting. While SERS is a highly sensitive analytical tool, the results are not easily reproducible. As a scientist at Berkeley Lab, Chen and colleagues developed a solution to this problem using what they called “nanoplasmonic resonators,” which measures the interaction of photons with an activated surface using nanostructures in order to do chemical and biological sensing. The method produces measurements much more reliably.
“At Optokey we’re able to mass produce this nanoplasmonic resonator on a wafer scale,” Chen said. “We took something from the R&D realm and turned it into something industrial-strength.”
The miniaturized sensors use a microfluidic control system for “lab on a chip” automated liquid sampling. The company is taking a page from the semiconductor industry in making its chip. “We’re leveraging knowledge acquired from high-tech semiconductor manufacturing methods to get the cost, the volume, and the accuracy in the chip,” said VP of Manufacturing Robert Chebi, a veteran of the microelectronic industry who previously worked at Lam Research and Applied Materials. “We’re also leveraging all the knowledge in lasers and optics for this specific Raman-based method.”
Chebi calls Optokey’s product a “biochemical nose,” or an advanced nanophotonic automated system, with sensitivity to the level of a single molecule, far superior to sensors on the market today. “Today’s detection and diagnosis methods are far from perfect—detection limits are in PPM (parts per million) and PPB (parts per billion),” he said. “Also, our system can provide information in minutes, or even on a continuous basis, versus other methods where it could take hours or even days, if samples have to be sent to another lab.”
The potential applications, he says, are vast, including food safety, environmental monitoring (of both liquids and gases), medical diagnosis, and chemical analysis. Optokey’s customers include a major European company interested in food safety, a Chinese petrochemical company interested in detecting impurities in its products, and a German company interested in point-of-care diagnosis.
Read more:Â Berkeley Lab Spinoff Company Makes Fast, Accurate Nanoscale Sensor
The Latest on: Nanoscale Sensor
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Nanoscale Sensor” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Nanoscale Sensor
- 10 Best Fingerprint Sensorson April 23, 2024 at 5:00 pm
♦ 【FUNCTION】 -The R307 optical fingerprint module integrates a fingerprint algorithm chip with functions such as fingerprint input, image processing, feature extraction, template generation ...
- New iPhone 16 Camera Treatment May Put an End to Lens Flareon April 15, 2024 at 3:01 pm
According to the latest iPhone 16 Pro supply chain rumor, Apple has been testing new anti-reflective optical coating technologies for its iPhone cameras to help eliminate lens flares and artifacts ...
- Nanoscale Thermodynamics: Exploring Energy Interactions at the Nanoscaleon April 15, 2024 at 1:09 pm
Nanoscale thermodynamics also finds applications in the development of highly sensitive and selective nanoscale sensors. Thermodynamic properties, such as the specific heat capacity or thermal ...
- Nanoscale movies shed light on one barrier to a clean energy futureon April 10, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Duke University. (2024, April 11). Nanoscale movies shed light on one barrier to a clean energy future. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 22, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com / releases / 2024 / 04 ...
- Meet the ‘quantum plumbers’ uncovering the mysteries of fluid mechanics at the nanoscaleon April 9, 2024 at 8:00 am
According to standard fluid dynamics, the friction between a flowing liquid and the pipe wall shouldn’t change as the pipe gets narrower. However, experiments have shown that when water flows through ...
- Aqara’s best presence sensor just got even betteron April 8, 2024 at 5:00 pm
That’s where presence sensors come in, and there are few more impressive than the Aqara FP2. This presence sensor has been an impressive piece of kit ever since it was released, but just ...
- A nanoscale look at how shells and coral form reveals that biomineralization is more complex than imaginedon March 25, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Schmidt et al, Myriad Mapping of nanoscale minerals reveals calcium carbonate hemihydrate in forming nacre and coral biominerals, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46117-x ...
- In-situ observation of nanoscale heat propagationon March 24, 2024 at 5:00 pm
"In-situ observation of nanoscale heat propagation." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com / releases / 2024 / 03 / 240321154720.htm (accessed April 18, 2024). Explore More ...
- Scientists discover super sensor for the smallest scaleson March 19, 2024 at 6:56 am
The probe has been used for imaging at the nanoscale level—about nine orders ... "Everybody wants sensors that are cheap, small, fast and easy—but also highly accurate," Passian said.
- Nanoscale Horizonson October 18, 2023 at 10:37 pm
Nanoscale Horizons Communications must include a separate ... We report a new tactile electronic skin sensor based on staircase-like vertically aligned gold nanowires (V-AuNWs). With the back-to-back ...
via Bing News