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Contact: Gang-yu Liu, Chemistry, (530) 754-9678, gyliu@ucdavis.edu.
News Release
Making protein nanostructures
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Modern analytic techniques use patterns of very small spots of
protein, DNA or other biological molecules to screen for genes or
proteins. Gang-yu Liu, associate professor of chemistry at UC Davis,
and her colleagues have now made dots of protein hundreds of times
smaller than those in any commercial "chip" device. Liu's laboratory
used scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy to
place eight molecules of the protein lysozyme in a square about 100
nanometers across on a gold surface. By reducing the size of dots in
gene or protein chips, the number of potential tests per device could
be hugely increased.