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February 14, 2013

New Use for Nanoscale Transistors

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Columbia University that included electrical engineers from the Engineering School and researchers from the Physics and Chemistry Departments collaborated to find a way to study single-molecule interactions on very short timescales using nanoscale transistors. The team showed for the first time, that transistors can be used to detect the binding of the two halves of the DNA double helix with DNA tethered to the transistor sensor. The transistors directly detect and amplify the charge of these single biomolecules. The research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (ECCS 07-07748).

To learn more, see the Columbia news story Researchers Find New Use for Nanoscale Transistors. (Date of Image: February 2011)

Credit: Sebastian Sorgenfrei, Columbia University


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