The above is a very impressive work from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory!
They utilized a lipid bilayer with ion pumps to cover the CNT-FET.
The ion pump as mentioned above, is made of ATPase which is powered by ATP hydrolysis; the ATPase is able to control the ion gradients across the membrane by metabolizing ATP.
They used a single semiconducting CNT to conduct this experiment and proved that the ATP can indeed act like a trigger to open the gate of ion pump, which is evidenced by the drain current change.
Moreover, they conjugated the head group of lipid with FITC which monitored the pH variation in the aqueous layer between CNT and lipid membrane. Finally, they explained that the drain current saturation is due to a small leak passage in the membrane or ion pump.
I think it is interesting to put a lipid on the top of CNT device, what if we put it on the graphene device?
Or maybe graphene itself can serve as a membrane or even we can even drill a hole on it to allow small biomolecules like DNA or RNA to pass through these holes, and we can monitor the ionic concentration change nearby the holes by recording the current change or something. It is not difficult to imagine that someone would think of this kind of idea, since in recent publication, the nanopore-related topics is also a very hot topic as graphene, both of them had appeared in Nano Letters or ACS Nano for many times.
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