Biosensing platform integrates molecular components into CMOS circuit

For centuries, chemistry has been about observing and manipulating the collective behavior of molecules. It wasn’t until the 1980s that researchers were handed the first tools to peek at and prod individual molecules. The number of available tools has greatly increased since then, and many of those have been gratefully adopted by life scientists to study the underpinnings of life at the molecular level.

And yet, there’s much left to be desired. Studies into the interactions between biomolecules are often still about averages: the extracted information is typically an average of many interaction events between molecules, obtained on a timescale much longer than the events themselves. In addition, these predominantly optical methods are constrained by the signal-to-noise ratio, spatial resolution and bandwidth. Only highly specialized experiments can unveil the nanoworld in real-time. These approaches are unsuitable for routine adoption in the life sciences.