EMSL will receive three-year funding of $1M per year from the DOE Office of Science for a pilot program to develop a "chemical nanoscope," an innovative chemical imaging platform that can interrogate biomolecules in living systems. EMSL scientist Scott Lea will lead a multi-institutional team to develop the new imaging platform.
"The chemical nanoscope will provide a new means to chemically identify specific microbial interactions through characteristic vibrational and electronic signatures of biomolecules with nanometric precision," said Lea. "Our chemical nanoscope will enable pursuit of novel research directions within DOE's mission portfolio."
The team will develop the chemical nanoscope, a scanning probe microscopy-based instrument, using three complementary chemical imaging techniques – infrared scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy, tip-enhanced Raman nano-spectroscopy and nanoscale UV-Vis-near-IR optical absorption spectroscopy. A novel in-situ imaging platform, the chemical nanoscope will make it possible to image a single microbial cell, with subcellular resolution of around 10-20 nanometers.
The other team members are Patrick El-Khoury and Matthew Marshall, both at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; and external collaborators are Markus Raschke, University of Colorado at Boulder; Nikhil Malvankar, Yale University; and Victoria Orphan, California Institute of Technology.
This technology development program is the result of a proposal to DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research, or BER, to create new technologies to probe the mechanisms cells use for communication and regulation across multiple length and time scales. The chemical nanoscope will be available to BER researchers, and the developed technology will be transferable to other institutions.