| Date | 28th, Apr 2022 |
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Nicole Iverson’s groundbreaking research into using carbon nanotubes as disease sensors has received a boost from the National Science Foundation.
The assistant professor of biological systems engineering has received a five-year, $550,000 grant from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program to further her study using nanotubes to diagnose diseases such as diabetes and myriad forms of cancer.
Professor Nicole Iverson discusses work a project with post-doc Omer Sadak as Samereh Soleimani Babadi (in the background) views a heat map on the monitor. Iverson has received a five-year, $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program. The award supports her team’s research into using carbon nanotubes as disease detectors and fighters. It also will be used for community outreach to expand understanding of nanotechnology. Photo by Craig Chandler | UNL Communication
Iverson also plans to use the award to expand community outreach to understand her work further and make the field of nanoscience more accessible to the general public.
“About 30 years ago, it was unthinkable to many that a whole world exists on a smaller scale than could be seen by a microscope,” Iverson said. “And new technologies can be very much misunderstood. If I can explain nanoscience and this research to people, especially when it’s sometimes counterintuitive to what we know about science, that can open doors in so many directions.”
A rolled-up sheet of carbon small enough to be considered one-dimensional is wrapped with a DNA strand in developing the innovative sensing platform. The outside is water-attracting and allows the otherwise water-repelling carbon inside the nanotube to remain in a body made up mostly of water.
The researchers will pair a nanotube that can detect hydrogen peroxide with another nanotube that detects hydrogen and nitric oxide. Laser light will be shined on the tubes, and the amount of light that is fluoresced, or emitted, can be measured.
“It’s a ‘turn-off’ sensor, which can confuse people,” Iverson said. “It goes back to fundamental physics and chemistry.
“You excite an electron, and it will hop up to the lowest unoccupied molecular orbit. Then it loses energy and gives off light as it falls back down and decays. The electron can’t go up as far with nitric oxide, so when it falls back, there’s not enough energy to fluoresce, so it’s turning the sensor off.”
Iverson said that the subtraction of hydrogen peroxide leaves behind nitric oxide, which has been challenging to detect and measure because it degrades very quickly — typically in less than a millisecond.
By contrast, when subtracting nitric oxide, all that remains is the hydrogen peroxide, which has been challenging to detect and measure because of the lack of a real-time sensor that is many times smaller than a human cell, Iverson said.
Joseph Stapleton, an undergraduate researcher and graduate student in Iverson’s lab, helped design a platform that allows the technique to find the actual concentration of nitric oxide and hydrogen peroxide with a carbon nanotube.
“It’s the students making some of these advances, and that’s amazing,” Iverson said. “People will be using this platform to develop ways to fight other diseases.”
Ultimately, the research team believes its nanotube-based detector could change medicine.
“Imagine if you could develop an insulin sensor for diabetics that could continuously detect what’s going on in their blood. It must only be implanted once a year, instead of having to prick your finger every day,” Iverson said. “Or if a person living in a rural area had something that alerts their smartphone and tells them to go to a doctor or the hospital. It could save lives by getting us better information much faster.”
Source: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
