In this interview, News-Medical Life Sciences talks to Lane Baker, Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University Bloomington about the role of electrochemistry in developing a sensitive biochemical membrane in addition to the ongoing work on at Baker’s laboratory.
Can you explain nanoscale electrochemistry?
The term ‘nanoscale electrochemistry’ has two meanings: One involves getting things down to the scale of nanometers, but the second is when the features of the system change. When you reach blades that are very small, things behave differently.
We saw this in electrochemistry in the late 1980s and early 90s, when things shrank to the microscale. This led to a revolution in electrochemistry, and the next revolution is nanoscale, as we move to even smaller plates where we get new onions related to the dimensions. Everything happens a lot faster at those smaller scales.
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What are some environmental and medical applications where nanoscale electrochemistry can be applied?
When you reach the nanoscale, you work at smaller sizes than individual cells; biology works at the nanoscale inherently.
Once you get down to the molecular scale of proteins, it will allow you to think of new ways to measure one protein at a time or to understand how one protein interacts with another.
If you start to think about trying to measure one of something with a nanometer scale – an electrochemical measurement – it is important to think about whether the measurement of that one reflects what the whole sample or group is. full of molecules trying to tell you.
Many applications in nanoscale electrochemistry and biology involve the use of a combination of nanoscale electrochemical statistics and measurements.
You may want to measure one thing, but you have to measure that same thing several times on many different molecules, then try to understand how that totality of molecules will give you a response that appears characteristics of the sample observed at larger plates. .
You specialize in nanopores. What are they, and how can they be used as a platform for nanoscale research?
A nanopore is a small hole that measures the order of nanometers in size. Biology uses things like nanopores to perform functions all the time, and these are found in protein channels, ion channels or transporters that circulate cell organs.
In synthetic systems, we can make nanopores out of many different types of materials, for example, carbon nanotubes or polymer membranes. My research group uses nanoscale tubes to do a lot of our research.
In electrochemistry, nanopores provide a means of controlling electric fields and ion and molecular densities in a very small and well-defined space. A nanopore is a different type of electricity than you would normally use, such as metal electricity you would do on Faradaic electroochemistry.
Instead, with a nanopore, we usually look at ions that pass over that pore in one way or another, or how ion transport through that pore is find out or improve based on the sample and the features we are trying to measure.
One way to understand pore or nanopore is to think of a football stadium. Imagine that the solution you are trying to explore is made up of all the people in the stadium, and you want to be able to sort and identify each of these people and understand what is happening. in them.
If you push all of these people through one gate to leave the football stadium, you can track each of them as they walk past and record something about each person.
With nanopore, we are trying to do the same. Instead of having a large solution, we are going to use a gate, which is our nanopore. By pushing all molecules through that gateway, we can count or identify them in some way as they pass through.
Nanopore gives us access. If the pore size decreases to the size of what we are trying to measure, it allows us to try to identify objects one at a time.
Can you describe the recent lab group work on the development of a biochemical sensitive membrane, sensors and electrochemical imaging using nanopores?
My organization has spent the best part of 15 years developing a device called ion-carrying microscopy (SICM) scanning, which allows us to measure local ionic behavior at inter- face. These interfaces can be things like a membrane, tissue samples, or individual cells.
SICM is great for taking landscape images and getting a picture of surface appearance, but we’ve also spent a lot of time trying to incorporate some sort of chemical selection into the landscape. measurement we make.
To do this, we modify the probes to provide specific features. For example, we have recently added ion channels to nanoscale tubes, essentially allowing the protein channel to be a sensor.
If we move a modified nanoscale tube with the protein channel near an interface in which we are interested, we can selectively measure which molecules that channel responds to.
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Your research is based on the intersection of natural sciences and technology. How do these areas affect each other?
I would urge natural sciences to mean the physical world we are trying to measure. Technology used to bring an instrument to mind, but now I think it also means things like data streams and new ways of processing that data.
At the heart of analytical chemistry are new types of instrumentation and methods for measurement. Almost every time a new field is opened or a very important discovery has been made, there has been some new device or new method that has allowed that measurement to be made.
I strongly believe in the idea of building new instruments, even when we don’t know what exactly we are going to do with them first. We try to push the limits of what we can measure, in terms of measuring something faster, at lower densities or in a weirder environment.
Once we have that tool, we are the proverbial hammer looking for nails, so we start exploring where we can apply this tool in the the physical world and what kinds of new measurements we can make that will allow us to better understand how the world works.
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Why did you choose to attend this year’s flagship Pittcon?
Pittcon has a special place in the analytical chemistry community. Many of us in my generation had experience in analytical chemistry at the Pittsburgh Conference.
Pittcon has always been a great place to hear about analytical chemistry, and it is also a place where many organizations and societies come together in a larger form and meet.
The Chemical Society of America and the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry are two organizations in which I participate, and I am very interested to see all my friends and talk about the industry going on in these communities.
Why do you feel that events like Pittcon are important, now more than ever?
I used to be very tired of traveling, but for now, if I had gotten on a plane and gone to New Orleans, I would have done so in a second. My group and I were really looking forward to going to Pittcon in New Orleans this year.
A year ago, when the pandemic began, New Orleans was a major focus on our calendar. When that changed, we were disappointed, but it did not change our need for motivation and the need to talk to others about our science and the science, to see where things are common and things we can learn. from each other.
Science will not happen in a vacuum, and we must make the most of what we have found under these conditions. I think if half of the meetings we used to have were meaningful meetings, that would be fine, but it would be great if Pittcon were still face – to – face and in places like New Orleans on a particular year.
Mu Baker Lane
Lane Baker received a BS from Missouri State University in 1996. He received his Ph.D. degree at Texas A&M University in 2001 working with Richard M. Crooks. He then joined the Postdoctoral Federation of the National Research Council to study experimental microscopes with Lloyd J. Whitman at the Naval research laboratory in Washington, DC. He studied nanopore membrane and single nanopore platforms as a postdoctoral binder with Charles R. Martin at the University of Florida.
Lane is interested in the electrochemical techniques for analysis and imaging. Current work in his organization focuses on applications of nanopores for selective chemical and biochemical membrane development, sensor development, and electrochemical imaging.