As Kaylee on Firefly would say, “Shiny!”. There have been many advances in ‘bio-chip’ technologies (this kind of bio-chip, not this kind), but getting a stable platform that can be used for continuous monitoring – not just one-shot analysis – of biological samples has been a long-standing problem. In the past, scientists tried in vain to develop surfaces with long-term stability for use as biosensors. But silicon, the material upon which computer-chip technology rests, tended to defy efforts to harness it as a stable surface for sensing biological molecules. “A widely recognized problem was that silicon oxide proved not to be a good material to do sensing on,” says researcher Robert Hamers. “In contact with water for any period of time, it eventually degrades. That was an obstacle to the merging of the microelectronic and biotechnology communities.” Other materials such as gold, glass and glassy carbon proved either unstable or difficult to integrate with silicon.
Now Dr. Robert Hamers at University of Wisconsin-Madison has used diamond to solve this problem. Biologically modified diamond films have proved to be remarkably durable and able to withstand multiple cycles of processing DNA, genetic material that can be diagnostic of such things as anthrax, ricin, bubonic plague, smallpox and other molecules that can potentially be used as biological weapons or agents of terror. “This is where we are going and we are almost there. The science is there. We’ve proven we can make surfaces that are much more stable than anything that existed before,” he says. “And we’ve proven that we can detect the electrical response when biomolecules bind to the diamond surface. You can really abuse it and it doesn’t care,” Hamers says. “The diamond films are chemically durable and they are electrochemically durable.”
Diamond biosensors would be about the size of a postage stamp and could be sprinkled in public places such as airports, bus depots, subways, stadiums and other places where large numbers of people gather. They could act, he says, like a “bio cell phone, where they just sit in place and sniff, and when they detect something of interest, send a signal” to alert security or sound an alarm. So in future wars, the first thing you may do on a battlefield…is sprinkle it with diamonds.