Using lab-on-a-chip technology for DNA detection and analysis is one specific goal many researchers are inching toward. Researchers have now offered a way to align DNA strands to allow for analysis within a nanofluidic channel. The difficulty and cost of creating nanochannels is an impediment, but new research, published in Biomicrofluidics, offers the use a cost-effective material that could garner long term results in DNA analysis.

Nanochannels offer a way to align and analyze long biopolymer molecules such as DNA with high precision at potentially single basepair resolution. In the article "Complementary metal oxide semiconductor compatible fabrication and characterization of parylene-C covered nanofluidic channels with integrated nanoelectrodes," published today in Biomicrofluidics, Chih-kuan Tung, Robert Riehn, and Robert H. Austin, present a novel method of fabricating nanochannels with parylene, while measuring impedance characteristics with 25 nanometer thick electrodes. Parylene-C is a cheap and robust material, which is typically used for coating printed circuit boards as well as stents, defibrillators, pacemakers, and other implanted medical devices.

The researchers believe that this technology will open up opportunities for electronic detection of charged polymers, and that "with techniques to fabricate nanoelectrodes with nanochannels, it should be possible to include integrated electronics with nanofludics, allowing the electronic observation of a single DNA molecule at high spatial resolution."

it's a trying world down there in the nucleus (unless you're mitochondrial DNA--they live on easy street). DNA isn't having an emotional day. It's just our old friend Brownian motion--he never stops moving in a fluctuating random dance. Also, Brownian motion might be a girl, no one knows for sure.

Well, Adam E. Cohen decided to do something about it. Yes, researchers have had some success in countering that infernal microscopic jiggle, but Dr. Cohen and his colleagues at Harvard been trying to look closely at the dynamics of DNA trapped inside of a microfluidic channel.

At the Industrial Physics Forum (part of the AVS annual meeting) in Boston last Monday, Dr. Cohen presented a lecture entitled "Single Molecule Imaging, Anti-Brownian Electrokinetic Trap."

Cohen is working with William E. Moerner at Stanford to discover the shape of a DNA molecule, how it deviates from an average shape, and the dynamics of how it moves from shape to shape. The results look very similar to different energy levels of electron orbits. I think. Maybe. Don't quote me on that. To see the pretty pictures yourself, take a look at this article published in PNAS last year.