ATLANTA, July 24 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've created a nanoscale probe that can capture both the biochemical makeup and topography of complex biological objects.
The Georgia Tech researchers say the nanoprobe can record in the biological objects' normal environment, which might lead to better disease diagnosis and drug design on the cellular level.
To create drugs capable of targeting some of the most devastating human diseases, scientists must first decode exactly how a cell or a group of cells communicates with other cells and reacts to a broad spectrum of complex biomolecules surrounding it.
But even the most sophisticated tools currently used for studying cell communications suffer from significant deficiencies and typically can only detect a narrowly selected group of small molecules or, for a more sophisticated analysis, the cells must be destroyed for sample preparation.
Georgia Tech researchers have created a nanoscale probe, the Scanning Mass Spectrometry probe, to solve the problem, said Engineering Professor Andrei Fedorov, lead researcher on the project.
"The SMS probe can help map all those complex and intricate cellular communication pathways by probing cell activities in the natural cellular environment," he said.
The research appears in the July issue of IEEE Electronics Letters.
