Molecular Bioelectronics

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NICOLINI CLAUDIO CURRICULUM VITAE
• CONTENTS

Nineteen years later (Nicolini, 1996a) molecular bioelectronics is emerging from the biochip (Nicolini, 1990) as a new scientific frontier at the crossing of life and physical sciences proving capable to operate at the interface of electronics and biotechnology with significant impact world-wide on the development of both industry and knowledge previously unmatched…

Several molecules of organic and biological origin being investigated in the last few years are here summarized as potentially useful active bioelements.

Recent work on protein monolayers (Nicolini et al., 1993, 1995; Shen et al., 1993; Facci et al., 1994b) appears to have for their exceptional thermal stability “the kind of implications that might capture the immediate interest of a wide audience,” as testified by the enthusiastic News and Views published in Naturesome time ago (Hampp, 1993). Typically, Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films of most organic compounds are formed in a Langmuir trough by spreading the solutions at the liquid–gas interface and transferring by a vertical lift technique onto solid substrate. In our laboratories protein monolayers are instead usually prepared with horizontal lift (Langmuir– Schaefer) technique modified in a specific manner and deposited on solid substrates in the range of surface pressure between 25 and 45 mN m⁻¹ (Nicolini et al., 1993; Erokhin et al., 1991)…

Semiconductor technology has changed our lives within only a few decades. Sand, a starting material, has been turned into a versatile “high-tech” product. Techniques have been developed for the production of silicon wafers and for the modification of this raw material into the final “hightech” product — miniature electronic logic functions. Research now focuses on the molecular level, from the micro to the nanostructures…

A biosensor is a device that incorporates a biological sensing element in close proximity of a transducer or integrated with it (Fig. 5.1), able to detect selectively one or more compounds present in a given analyte. The utilisation of a biological element renders the system specific, as it is typical for the biological molecules; the transducer produces an indirect signal due to the reaction between the biological element and the target analyte, and not to the interaction of transducer with analyte…

The following sections are included:

• Monoelectronic transistors
• Bioactuators
• Photovoltaic cells
• DNA and peptide sequencing microchips
  • Drug screening chip
• Optical filtering and holography
• Passive and active frontier elements
  • Passive elements
    • Capacitors
    • Resistors
  • Active elements
    • LED
    • Batteries
    • Photovoltaic cells

The design of complex molecular functions is a goal difficult to achieve with the classical approach of chemistry and supramolecular chemistry. Nature developed a large manifold of such “nanomaterial.” Today, it is not possible to construct such complex materials ab initio, but we can start out from those molecules that we discover in nature and try to modify their properties and adapt them towards the demands of technical applications. As shown in this book the tools that are necessary to put these ideas into practice are now available. Bacteriorhodopsin is a possible model for this approach, as motivated by the extraordinary properties of this molecule and because it is one of the few biopolymers where a sufficiently detailed structure-function relationship is available. Not only may the photochromism of bacteriorhodopsin be of technical importance, but also its photoelectric properties may be of equal value. However, for optical applications a wide range of classical materials exist which can be used as references for the evaluation of whether the biological materials can compete with them…

The necessity of reducing the size of electronic circuit elements while devising environmentally pure technologies for producing them has, in the last three decades, spawned an interdisciplinary area of research termed bioelectronics, originally based on the idea that a single molecule can work as a self-contained elementary information processor so that novel computer architectures can be built, including those that could emulate the brain (Nicolini, 1990). An overview of this area was given in papers by Nicolini (1995a,b, 1996a, 2008, 2015) where some of significant progress up to date was in the areas of biomolecular electronics, neural VLSI chip (Khodabandehloo et al., 2012), nanoelectronics and biomolecular engineering. To date, the tiniest transistor in production, belonging to the family of “Ivy Bridge,” has an average gate of 22 nm, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microstructure)…

The following sections is included:

• REFERENCES