Northwestern chemist develops nanoplotter with parallel writing ca...( quiring only one feedback system Mirki...),Health

quiring only one feedback system, Mirkin's nanoplotter has other advantages. It can be automated, it uses a relatively inexpensive tool (an atomic force microscope) that is common in the laboratories of companies and universities, and it works under normal atmospheric conditions as opposed to a billion-dollar semiconductor fab line.

"Ideally, we want to have total control over the chemical composition, or architecture, of the nanostructures we build down to the sub-10 nanometer regime," said Mirkin, also director of Northwestern's Institute for Nanotechnology and Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly. "It's a level of refinement that will open the doors to remarkable scientific discovery and the realization of exciting new technologies. The parallel process nanoplotter takes us closer to our goal."

Mirkin's next step is to expand the current nanoplotter's capabilities. He hopes to have a working 50-pen nanoplotter by the end of next year.

"It soon will be possible to pattern one master plate with thousands of different organic nanostructures, each structure designed to react with a certain disease agent, for example," said Mirkin. "That's what is exciting about this -- no other method exists to do this on such a small scale."

In the case of biomolecules like DNA, it will be possible to generate ultrahigh density combinatorial arrays that could be quite useful in the genomics and medical diagnostics industries. Such arrays are currently generated via techniques with much lower resolution than DPN.

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Contact: Megan Fellman
fellman@northwestern.edu
847-491-3115
Northwestern University
7-Jun-2000

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