Upcoming publication : review on biophotonics applications of nanoapertures
Nanometric apertures in a metallic film are easy to produce, robust and highly reproducible nanophotonic devices that possess a number of desirable properties for biophotonics. In a special issue of the International Journal of Materials and Product Technology, I will describe some exciting applications of sub-wavelength apertures towards the sensitive and specific characterization of molecules.
Outline : 1/ introducing nanoapertures, 2/ Performing FCS in reduced volumes, 3/ Single molecule analysis in a nanohole, 4/ Sub-diffraction diffusion analysis within lipidic membranes, 5/ Fluorescence emission enhancement, 6/ Biosensing applications of sub-wavelength apertures.
An unedited version of the paper is available on the MOSAIC website >> here.
SPP3 conference June 2007
I will attend to the next SPP meeting to be held in
In an oral contribution, I shall present our recent results towards the application of nanometric apertures in a gold film to biophotonics applications.
Link to SPP3 meeting : www.plasmonanodevices.org/spp3/
Image nanospot cell
The following image was submitted as cover art for a Biophysical Journal issue (following our paper on cells under the nanospotlight). Unfortunately, the technical staff editors did not accept to consider it : direct cover art suggestions are not welcome. This is quite surprising, and I must say, even a bit disappointing. So that it does not completely disappear, I put it as an illustration for my blog…
Cells under the nanospotlight : latest publication
Our latest publication has been released in the February edition of the Biophysical Journal :
J. Wenger, F. Conchonaud, J. Dintinger, L. Wawrezinieck, T.W. Ebbesen, H. Rigneault, D. Marguet, et P.-F. Lenne, Diffusion analysis within single nanometric apertures reveals the ultrafine cell membrane organization, Biophys. J., vol.92, pp. 913-919 (2007).
It describes a novel approach to explore the ultrafine plasma membrane organization of living cells. Our strategy combines single nanometric apertures in a metallic film with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). Performing FCS measurements with increasing aperture sizes, we observe different diffusion regimes, which reveal the kind and the size of the nanometric membrane heterostructures. We believe this method brings drastic improvements to exisiting well-established techniques : compared to conventional FCS, our method has a high spatial resolution, necessary to quantify membrane heterogeneities at the submicron scale. Alternatively to single particle tracking, our method takes advantage of a high temporal resolution at the microsecond range together with a simple data analysis.
Click here to read the abstract and download the paper.
US-French collaboration
For two weeks, we’ll be welcoming at Marseille Prof. Steve Blair and Colby Wilson from
The primary scientific goals of the extended-stay international research and educational visit to Institut Fresnel Marseille are to resolve the issue of the relative contributions of fluorescence excitation and emission enhancements in metal nanocavities and to study the influence of nanoaperture shape.
