Techniques For Manipulation And Detection Of Single Molecules

There has been an increasing interest in understanding the behavior and properties of bio-molecules at the single molecule level, both from fundamental and applied perspectives. Towards that, tremendous advances have been made in terms of techniques for manipulation and detection of single molecules to enable their analysis and inspection.

This talk will present three such microfluidic techniques developed in our group for manipulating and detecting analytes in solution. The first technique, three-dimensional (3-D) hydrodynamic focusing is a generalization of conventional hydrodynamic focusing to three dimensions. The second technique involves a novel approach that permits immobilization and isolation of individual DNA molecules within microfluidic channels and their release by electrical heating. The third technique uses microfluidic chips fabricated by single layer soft lithography methods for a variety of microfluidic operations such as pumping, sorting and mixing. In addition, ongoing research from our group on ultrasensitive detection techniques based on Raman spectroscopy will be presented.