News: Dr Biyani's work accepted to participate in MicroTAS 2009 to be held on Nov 1-5, 2009 in Jeju, Korea ------- Dr Biyani's work accepted to publish in Nucleic Acids Research, Oxford Journal (May 2009) ------- Dr Biyani hosts a Indo-Japan symposium on "Nanotechnology and Health-care" in Biyani Girls College, India on Sept 20-22, 2009 ------- Dr Biyani wins bursary and travel grant from DST, India to attend XX International Congress of Genetics in Berlin (July, 2008)

µ-RA: Micro reactor arrays for high-throughput and ultra-sensitive bioassays

Understanding how bio-molecules organize and function in a cell will require tools comparable in size to the basic components of life. It means the tools must be in the ‘right’ size to handle these bio-molecules at biologically relevant scale. Nanotechnologies in combination with microscopic techniques can allow the analysis of nanometer-sized bio-molecules inside very small containers (reactors).

We, at Ichiki laboratory (University of Tokyo), have developed a microfabricated chip using photolithography which is comprising of uniformly distributed femtoliter scale reactors in 10,000 microchabmber/mm2. The diameter and volume of single micro chambers are ~5µm and ~120 femtoliters, respectively (see Fig. below).

We have evaluated the enzymatic activity of mutant aldehyde reductase (AKR) inside the micro reactors in a sub-picoliter scale which corresponds to 10,000 molecules per reactor. We also evaluated and demonstrated the feasibility of single-molecule level enzyme assay for beta-galactosidase inside the micro reactor.

We expect this tool will be useful in a number of biomedical applications where accurate and highly sensitive target analysis is required.

 

     References:

  • Manish Biyani, Terutsune Osawa, Naoto Nemoto and Takanori Ichiki (2008) One-to-one gene-encoded     functional protein microarray. In: Proc of 12th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for
        Chemistry and Life Sciences. MicroTAS, San Diego, USA, vol.2, p.p.1781-1783.
  • Manish Biyani, Naoto Nemoto, Yosuke Hosoi and Takanori Ichiki (2006) RNA-to-Protein Chip:
        an integrated microarray platform to bridge genomics and proteomics. In: Proc. of 10th
        International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences. MicroTAS, Tokyo,     Japan, vol.1, p.p.209-211
  • Yosuke Hosoi, Manish Biyani, Naoto Nemoto, Takanori Akagi and Takanori Ichiki (2005)
        High-throughput screening of mutant biomolecules using mRNA display and microreactor array chips. In:
        Proc. of International Conference on Solid State Device and Materials, SSDM, Kobe, Japan, pp.452-453.
  • Yosuke Hosoi, Manish Biyani, Naoto Nemoto and Takanori Ichiki (2005) High-Throughput Screening of      mutant AKR enzymes using mRNA display and novel microreactor array chips. In: Proc. of 9th
         International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences,
         MicroTAS, Boston, USA, vol.1, p.p. 323-325.