Single Molecule Vibrational Spectroscopy & Proteomics

Plasmonic nano-antennas with their unique ability to focus light beyond the diffraction limit, are at the core of a myriad of new exciting opportunities. Using collective plasmonic excitations in nano-antenna arrays, we have demonstrated 100,000 fold signal enhancements in conformational signatures of proteins. We achieved record low zepto-mole detection limits corresponding to vibrational signatures from ~10 molecules per antenna opening the door to single molecule level absorption spectroscopy.

Adato* & Yanik* et al. “Ultrasensitive Vibrational Spectroscopy of Protein Monolayers with Plasmonic Nanoantenna Arrays”, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. , 106, 19227 (2009). (*co-first authors)

Adato & Yanik et al. “Radiative Engineering of Plasmon Lifetimes in Embedded Nanoantenna Arrays”, Optics Express, Vol 18, pp. 4526-4537 (2010). (*co-first authors) 

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“Pickin' up Good Vibrations, with Nanoantenna Arrays”, Biophotonics International, Jan, 2010. 

Highlighted in The Journal of Future Medicine “Nanoantenna Analysis of Biomolecules could give New Lease of Life to Drug Design” , December, 2009.

“Ultra-Sensitive Vibrational Spectroscopy”, Spectroscopy Now. Jan 15, 2010.

“Identifying Molecules in Infrared Could Lead to New Medicines”, The Epoch Times, Nov 3, 2009.

“New technique for "Seeing" How Proteins Interact is a Potential Game Changer”, U.S.NEWS, Oct 28, 2009.

 Highlighted in National Academy Of Sciences Timeline. 

“Identifying Molecules in Infrared Could Lead to New Medicines”, National Science Foundation, Oct 26, 2009.

"Invited Paper" in Virtual Journal of Biological Physics Research, Volume 18, Issue 11 (2009).

"Invited Paper" in Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science & Technology, Volume 20, Issue 22 (2009).

Real-Time Protein Dynamics with Fano-Resonant Metamaterials

In-depth understanding of life-sustaining biomolecular-recognition processes has the potential to impact every corner of life sciences and medicine. However, state-of-art biosensing techniques can only probe the biomaterial accumulations due to molecular bindings, not the underlying confirmational changes required for binding processes to occur. Recently, we introduced a structure-resolving label-free biosensing technique based on plasmonic Fano-resonant asymmetric metamaterials (FRAMMs) that can simultaneously probe structural and binding characteristics of biomolecular interactions.

Wu et al. “Fano-Resonant Asymmetric Metamaterials for Ultra-Sensitive Spectroscopy and Identification of Molecular Monolayers”,  Nature Materials, 11, 69 (2012).

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“Plasmonic Biosensors: Know Your Molecules” by Na Liu and Annemarie Pucci, Nature Materials News & Reviews, 11, pp 9-10 (2012).

"Fano resonances help characterize proteins " Institute of Physics (IoP), Nanotech News, Nov 25, 2011.

Provisional Patent Filed (#6063SHV), Oct. 12, 2011. “Fano-Resonant Asymmetric Metamaterials for Ultrasensitive Identification of Biomolecules”, 

Quantitative Intracellular Surface Enhanced Raman Nanospectroscopy 

Metallic nanoparticles in cellular environment have a tendency to aggregate which poses a major obstacle in obtaining "quantitative" in-vivo SERS measurements. Recently, we have proposed and demonstrated a unique SERS technique enabling precise quantification of exogenous chemicals in living human cells. To achieve this, we utilized inherent metallic optical-phonon vibrational signatures in Raman spectrum to obtain a quantitative measure of the amount of the nanoparticle aggregates, for the first time.

“Intracellular Quantification by Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy”, Ali Shamsaiea, Jordan Heima, Ahmet Ali Yanik, and Joseph Irudayaraj, Chemical Physics Letters, Vol. 461, 131-135, (2008).

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Highlighted by National Research Council of Canada, NRC-CISTI: Discover Aug 8, 2008. J22.