Emerging Technology and Best Practices Seminar Series

Nanotechnology in Medicine: From Diagnostics to Therapeutics

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Hybrid Nanomaterials as Probes in Quantitative Biology

Bjorn Reinhard, Ph.D.

In this talk I will give an overview of our current efforts to use nanomaterials with advantageous optical properties to engineer probes that can provide a quantitative description of elementary life processes. I will introduce the concept of plasmon coupling as dynamic molecular ruler and illustrate how a distance dependent near field interaction can be used to measure distances and distance changes between individual molecules with high temporal bandwidth. Using gold nanoparticles as probes we can now measure distance changes on the 1-100 nm range without limitation in observation time.