| 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. |
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| (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 |
