Toward single-molecule nanomechanical mass spectrometry
By A. Naik, M. S. Hanay, Wayne Hiebert, X. Feng, Michael L. Roukes. Nature Nanotechnology, 2005
651 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mass spectrometry (MS) provides rapid and quantitative identification of protein species with relatively low sample consumption. Yet with the trend toward biological analysis at increasingly smaller scales, ultimately down to the volume of an individual cell, MS with few-to-single molecule sensitivity will be required. Nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) provide unparalleled mass sensitivity, which is now sufficient for the detection of individual molecular species in real time. Here we report the first demonstration of MS based on single-biological-molecule detection with NEMS. In our NEMS-MS system, nanoparticles and protein species are introduced by electrospray injection from fluid phase in ambient conditions into vacuum and subsequently delivered to the NEMS detector by hexapole ion optics. Precipitous frequency shifts, proportional to the mass, are recorded in real time as analytes adsorb, one-by-one, onto a phase-locked, ultrahigh frequency NEMS resonator. These first NEMS-MS spectra, obtained with modest mass sensitivity from only several hundred mass adsorption events, presage the future capabilities of this approach. We also outline the substantial improvements that are feasible in the near term, some of which are unique to NEMS-MS.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Spectroscopy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f7b60e5b16bd4f1881e1fc54c0d2d6d4a94adcc
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Herre S. J. van der Zant
- Menno Poot
- Stephan Sylvest Keller
- Silvan Schmid
- Maria Tenje
- Søren Dohn
- Anja Boisen
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In Biomedical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Mechanical systems in the quantum regime (2011, background): “Finally, NEMS may find an application in mass sensing [352,353,78,77,76,354,97,355]: the state-of-the-art is that single gold atoms can be measured (see Section 4).”
- A nanomechanical mass sensor with yoctogram resolution. (2012, methodology): “NEMS resonators have been used to weigh cells, biomolecules, and gas molecules, creating many new possibilities for biological and chemical analysis [1-4].”
- Cantilever-like micromechanical sensors (2011, methodology): “The method requires large magnetic fields and low temperatures and has recently been used in mass detection using nanometre-sized cantilevers [224].”