Materials science in general, and nanoscience and nanotechnology in particular, have promised multiple applications enabled by an unprecedented control of matter. One of them is the ultimate miniaturization of electronic components and circuits to the scale of individual molecules. This exciting field is known as Molecular Electronics. Shortly after opening the door for reliable single-molecule conductance measurements, biomolecules were also considered as the subject of these studies. The field of biomolecular electronics has experienced a boom in the last decades. Not only the developments in microscopy have allowed researchers to study biological details of fundamental processes with a high spatial and temporal resolution, but nanoscience tools such as Scanning Probe Microscopies have led to biophysical studies at the single-molecule level. Notably, Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) has enabled researchers to perform single-molecule electronic studies of biomolecules, including nucleic acids, redox proteins, and more complex biosystems. In this contribution, we show examples of the new biomolecular electronics projects in our lab (http://faculty.uml.edu/artes), where we integrate classical nanotechnology methods from materials science and characterization for the study of different biological systems: #The analysis of the biomolecular interactions at the RNA Induced Silencing Complex. #The single-molecule electrical detection of circulating tumor nucleic acids to study cancer biomarkers and the early diagnostics through liquid biopsy. We are currently obtaining preliminary results on the charge transport through double-stranded and single-stranded RNA oligonucleotides, showing that these single-biomolecule electrical fingerprints contain important biophysical information. These methods and results could be applied to numerous biological problems, paving the way to a whole new body of biophysics and materials science knowledge. In particular, electrical signals have demonstrated helpful in detecting RNA. This, combined with new results from biomolecular interactions, could allow a complete molecular understanding of how regulatory RNA elements work.

RNA biomolecular electronics: Biophysics and other applications

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.