Posted: August 21, 2007

Organic nanotube-based nanopipette with an inner diameter of 50 nm

(Nanowerk News) Japanese researchers led by Prof. Toshio Fukuda of the Department of Micro-Nano Systems Engineering at Nagoya University, have developed a nanopipette that uses an organic nanotube (ONT) as its nanochannel, and which is estimated to be capable of dispensing volumes of solution of less than 1 femtoliter (femto- means one quadrillionth: 10–15).
The ONT nanopipette is fabricated by fixing a 10-µm-long ONT with an inner diameter of 50 nm and outer diameter 400 nm, which forms the nanochannel, to a microglass pipette with an inner diameter of 1.8 µm by using micromanipulation technology, and then sealing the interspace between the ONT and the glass micropipette with a photo-crosslinkable resin.
organic nanotube nanopipette Schematic of nanopipette
(Images: AIST)
The dispension volume from the nanopipette can be controlled by the voltage applied to the nanopipette.
This ONT nanotube is expected to be used for medical purposes, due to its ability to inject ultrasmall amounts of useful material into a single cell (a volume of a cell is about 1000 femtoliters) or to extract ultrasmall amounts of cell ingredients for single-cell analyses.
The research results will be presented at the 7th IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology (IEEE-NANO 2007), organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Inc., which is to be held in Hong Kong on August 2-5, 2007.
Source: AIST