Micro and nanopore structures for biological applications

The power of micromachining of structures in silicon is now begining to be fully exploited in biotechnology. The author gives three examples of what kinds of structures can be made and their applications. (1) The development of our understanding of the parameters necessary for successful separation and fabrication of sufficiently small structures for sequencing. (2) Cell fractionation from whole blood. (3) Protein folding. This is a new project. The idea is to use a combination of micron-scale structures, hydrodynamic focusing and diffusional mixing to achieve microsecond mixing times of renaturing solvents with a denatured protein solution