Bringing nanotech to the fore

The NanoProfessor NanoScience Education Program was born in recognition of the need of a curriculum in colleges and universities to provide people trained in the science of nanotechnology to work in this fast-expanding field

RECENT statements in the USA from the National Science Foundation indicate that upwards of two million trained technologists will be needed globally by the year 2015. Currently, there are only about 20,000 trained personnel and the majority of these are qualified to PhD level and beyond. This means there is a significant future resource gap. Simply put, this projected global requirement cannot be met by individuals with PhDs. It is neither feasible from a demographic or financial perspective. Nanotechnology requires “simplifying” to make it easy to apply and be understood.

Currently, there is little hands-on nanotechnology training at the college level. Given the future gap in resources available compared to that which the world will need in the coming years, a nanoscience education initiative that combines hands-on experience in nanotechnology with an experiential-based curriculum has become necessary. This is the driving force behind the NanoProfessor NanoScience Education Program.

From the carbon black added to car tyres to aid in braking to titanium dioxide in sun screen to help protect our bodies from the sun’s harmful UV rays, nanotechnology is present in all areas of life. The benefits of “small” and the positive impact nanotechnology has in helping to create a green world has stimulated a tremendous drive to apply it in many areas of manufacturing and industry. 

In particular, nanotechnology is becoming very important in the life sciences arena for drug discovery and development. Areas include stem cell research and the development of new drug release systems. As the world demands products that are faster, quicker, smaller and cheaper, nanotechnology is increasingly looked at as the main route to achieving these goals. Indeed, nanotechnology has grown in response to market needs and has the unique position of combining all scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, and engineering) to provide exciting new products for tomorrow’s world.

The program will give students the opportunity to gain true hands-on nanoscience experience in the areas of biology, chemistry and physics.

The heart of the NanoProfessor NanoScience Education Program is NanoInk's NLP 2000 System (NLP 2000). The NLP 2000 is the first and only desktop nanofabrication platform that allows users to quickly and easily build custom-engineered, nano-scale structures using NanoInk’s patented Dip Pen Nanolithography (DPN) using a wide variety of materials from metal nanoparticles to biomolecules, (figure 1).

The technique which originated in the laboratory of Mirkin and his co-workers at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA was first reported in 2001 and has since been proven in multiple papers published worldwide as an extremely important lithographic technique to understand processes on the nanoscale ultimately leading to a manufacturing platform.

As well as addressing multiple scientific disciplines, the program introduces other

Figure 1: the DPN process

techniques to the students. Included will be a teaching-level AFM system. This unit will be a desk-top product - the Nanosurf easyScan 2 FlexAFM (figure 2), and it will provide the understanding of imaging and manipulating materials on the nanoscale. It has been chosen as one of the easiest to use AFMs available today, having built a strong reputation over a twelve year period.

An advanced, state of the art LED-fluorescence light microscope will also be used (one of the latest Axio Scope upright microscopes from leading German microscopy manufacturers, Carl Zeiss, figure 3). An LED source is chosen as this provides significantly better lifetime than a mercury lamp providing an at-will intensity-stable source for long periods. When certain compounds are illuminated with high energy light, they then emit light of a different, lower frequency. This effect is known as fluorescence. This method is of critical importance in the life sciences as it can be extremely sensitive, allowing the detection of single molecules.

Completing the NanoProfessor program is an exciting curriculum which is grounded in fundamental science and engineering concepts at the nano-scale level.  Students will gain valuable and insightful experience through interdisciplinary focused, hands-on experiments and manufacturing via the state-of-the art NLP 2000 (figure 4). Importantly, it is very easy to use as demonstrated when high school students participating in the company’s summer intern program were able to succeed in building structures within a matter of hours of introduction to the system.

NanoProfessor is much more than just the supply of instrumentation. It is a

Figure 2: the Nanosurf easyScan 2 FlexAFM

curriculum driven program that provides a 10-12 week teaching program. The elements will start with an introduction to the nanoscale. It will look at some of the tools that are available before going through applications of physics, chemistry and biology, each at the nanoscale. To do this successfully means the provision of manuals and consumables and, not to forget, the training of the teachers themselves. This will be an iterative process initially but will rapidly develop into the first real course on nanoscience.

NanoInk is supporting the NanoProfessor Program with several initiatives focused on directing students into the programs of participating schools. Included in these initiatives are the NanoProfessor NanoScience Scholarship Program and marketing templates that participating schools can use in marketing their new or expanding nanoscience offerings to prospective students. 

The program will be implemented initially at the college level. In the USA, this will be as part of a two year or a four year

Figure 3: Carl Zeiss Axio Scope LED Fluorescence Microscope

course. The first installation will be in place for the start of the 2009-2010 academic year. Its home will be at Dakota County Technical College (DCTC). Located in Rosemount, Minnesota close to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, the program will be led by Professor Deb Newberry, a pioneer committed to nanoscience education. Newberry is the director of the Nanoscience Program at DCTC and also the director of a newly funded NSF Regional Center for Nanotechnology Education, Nano-Link.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Dakota County Technical College a $552,000 Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics grant. The S-STEM grant provides funding for fifteen $8,000 scholarships a year over the course of four years for eligible students enrolling or already enrolled in the college's Nanoscience Technology, Civil Engineering Technology, Networking Administration, Information Systems Management and Software Development programs.

While nanotechnology saw initial growth in the semiconductor industry, nanotechnology is now growing in virtually every type of industry. Nanotechnology has followed a top-down approach miniaturising existing processes to produce structures of smaller and smaller size (e.g. heading towards the 22nm line width in the world of semiconductors). However, future nanotechnology developments are more likely to take a bottom-up fabrication approach which is why the process of DPN will increase in importance, further emphasising the need for trained nanotechnologists. This trend typified by exciting advancements in the bio/life sciences area have led NanoInk to launch two new nanotechnology divisions – NanoStem Cell and Nano BioDiscovery which have already found potential new and viable applications. 

The NanoStem Cell Division is leveraging DPN nanopatterning technology to

Figure 4: The NLP 2000 System

create proprietary NanoStem biochips. These biochips will provide unparalleled control and scalability for producing differentiated, homogeneous mature cell populations. Using DPN technology, it is possible to tightly control stem cell differentiation, keep adult stem cells in undifferentiated form or induce differentiation to a homogenous population of cells. Some of the initial work in this area is being carried out at the University of Liverpool in the group of Professor John Hunt working closely with the Strathclyde team headed by Professor Duncan Graham, the Director of the centre for Molecular Nanometrology.

NanoStem Cell’s proprietary biochips are developed by depositing chemical cues in a highly precise pattern onto a solid surface using DPN technology. Adherence, growth,
and differentiation of adult stem cells on a NanoStem biochip is dependent upon both the composition of the chemical cue and the pattern of the cues on the NanoStem; biochip. Full production of the desired homogeneous cell type is achieved normally within 28 days. Thus, it is possible to produce unlimited and homogeneous populations of differentiated stem cells of any type on demand. The concept is illustrated in figure 5.

The Nano BioDiscovery Division is a proteomics product and service supplier providing a new generation of array-based instrument systems and contract research services for nanoscale protein detection. It combines DPN nanofabrication technology with optimised substrates and next-generation detection systems for a total system solution.

Traditional protein arrayers that use pin spotted technology often print

Figure 5: Applying DPN for stem cell differentiation

inconsistent features, which can lead to poor reproducibility. And these traditional pin arrays are typically limited to 16 sub-arrays per slide. Other protein detection techniques exhibit prohibitively slow reaction kinetics or require large amounts of sample material and reagents. Leveraging the improved reproducibility and low non-specific binding conferred by reliable DPN nanopatterning, nanodiscovery fluorescent systems and services improve proteomics data quality and enable scientists to probe proteins buried deep in the proteome. Because sample size is nanoscale, even low-abundance protein studies are possible. DPN’s ability to print up to 96 sub-arrays per slide translates to high throughput protein analysis on a single slide. Complex, multi-component arrays may be readily produced (figure 6). Since DPN technology uses femtofluidic liquid handling to deposit extremely small quantities of proteins and reagents, it enables rapid reaction kinetics and assay cost-savings.

We have seen that the NanoProfessor NanoScience Education Program was born

Figure 6: Schematic of a human HER2 receptor and EGF receptor kinase array in a Nano BioDiscovery Fluorescent System array

on the back of the success of DPN as a nanofabrication process. The fit of NanoInk’s DPN technology was realised by the development and launch of the NLP 2000 in March 2009. Until then, hands-on experience in actually building nanoscale features was often relegated to a few fortunate individuals who had access to costly and time-intensive equipment such as e-beam lithography. The goal for the NanoProfessor is to produce a better trained nanotechnology workforce that has true hands-on nanotechnology experience to meet the resource needs of the rapidly growing nanotechnology industry.
 
NanoInk is committed to working with researchers, academics, government and industry to building an on-going nanoscience-specific curriculum that will provide students and workers with the skills and hands-on experience necessary to make them highly desirable human assets for the myriad of industries and jobs dedicated to the growing science and commercialisation of nanotechnology.