Jerome Wenger NanoBioPhotonics

I will attend to the next SPP meeting to be held in Dijon ( France ) next June.

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/

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…

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.

For two weeks, we’ll be welcoming at Marseille Prof. Steve Blair and Colby Wilson from Utah University (Salt Lake City, ). We also welcome Mr Farhad Madhavi for three months. This is part of an ongoing international collaboration funded by NSF international PhD student exchange program.

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.

To get the experiments work properly, of course, much time has to be spent, much care has to be taken, BUT this is (generally) not enough.

There is a third point, which each expert knows, but mostly no one discusses about : the Experiment’s God needs to be satisfied. And to have Him in good mood, presents and gifts must be offered. Then, adding sweat and carefulness, the experiment will work for sure ;o)

Here is a picture of the presents to the Experiment’s God in Marseille :

And the proof that other groups know about it (© Jorge Cham):