In the past 25 years many techniques have been developed to characterize cell adhesion and to quantify adhesion forces. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has been used to measure forces in the pico-newton range, an experimental technique known as force spectroscopy. We modified such an AFM to measure adhesion forces between live cells or between cells and surfaces. This strategy required functional...

The purpose of this research is to investigate gold nanoparticles as a potential scaffold for the characterization of DNA damage and repair using atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques. The procedure consists of functionalizing the surface of gold nanoparticles with DNA which are then immobilized onto amine modified silicon or glass surfaces. Our objective is to examine various lesions in ind...

Nanoparticles have been proposed as carriers for drugs, genes and therapies to treat various diseases. Many strategies have been developed to target nanomaterials to specific or over-expressed receptors in diseased cells, and these typically involve functionalizing the surface of nanoparticles with proteins, antibodies or other biomolecules. Here, we show that the targeting ability of such func...

Hydroxamic acids chelate metals with high affinity and form hydrolytically stable complexes with metal oxides such as TiO2. However, these appealing binding properties can cause problems during the preparation and application of metallocatalysts with appended hydroxamate anchoring groups. Here we show that the tetrahydropyran (THP) O-protected hydroxamate group can be cleaved in situ on a TiO2 ...

By functionalizing the surfaces of ZnO nanobelts (NBs) with a thin self-assembled molecular layer, the electrical and optoelectronic performances of a single NB-based device are drastically improved. For a single NB-based device, due to energy band tuning and surface modification, the conductance was enhanced by 6 orders of magnitude upon functionalization; a coating molecule layer has changed ...

BACKGROUND The development of nanoparticles for the delivery of therapeutic agents has introduced new opportunities for the improvement of medical treatment. Recent efforts have focused on developing targeted nanoparticles, which are formulated by (for therapeutic delivery) functionalizing nanoparticle surfaces with targeting molecules, such as antibodies, peptides, small molecules and oligonuc...

Nonmuscle cells exert biomechanical forces known as traction forces on the extracellular matrix (ECM). Spatial coordination of these traction forces against the ECM is in part responsible for directing cell migration, for remodeling the surrounding tissue scaffold, and for the folds and rearrangements seen during morphogenesis. The traction forces are applied through a number of discrete adhesi...

Solvent-assisted ligand incorporation (SALI) is useful for functionalizing the channels of metal-organic framework (MOF) materials such as NU-1000 that offer substitutionally labile zirconium(IV) coordination sites for nonbridging ligands. Each of the 30 or so previous examples relied upon coordination of a carboxylate ligand to achieve incorporation. Here we show that, with appropriate attenti...

High-throughput screening for genetic analysis, combinatorial chemistry, and clinical diagnostics benefits from multiplexing, which allows for the simultaneous assay of several analytes but necessitates an encoding scheme for molecular identification. Current approaches for multiplexed analysis involve complicated or expensive processes for encoding, functionalizing, or decoding active substrat...

In this paper, we demonstrate the preparation of monodispersed quantum dots (QDs) as near-infrared (NIR) optical probes for in vivo pancreatic cancer targeting and imaging. The design of these luminescent probes involves functionalizing NIR QDs with ligand mercaptosuccinic acid (MSA), which targets the tumor site by enhanced permeability and retention effect. The colloidal and optical stability...