Robust Photoelectric Biomolecular Switch at a Microcavity-Supported Lipid Bilayer.

Biomolecular devices based on photo-responsive proteins have been widely proposed for medical, electrical, and energy storage and production applications. Also, bacteriorhodopsin (bR) has been extensively applied in such prospective devices as a robust photo addressable proton pump. As it is a membrane protein, in principle, it should function most efficiently when reconstituted into a fully fluid lipid bilayer, but in many model membranes, lateral fluidity of the membrane and protein is sacrificed for electrochemical addressability because of the need for an electroactive surface.

Microcavity array supported lipid bilayer models of ganglioside - influenza hemagglutinin binding.

The binding of influenza receptor (HA1) to membranes containing different glycosphingolipid receptors was investigated at Microcavity Supported Lipid Bilayers (MSLBs). We observed that HA1 preferentially binds to GD1a but the diffusion coefficient of the associated complex at lipid bilayer is approximately double that of the complexes formed by HA1 GM1 or GM3.

Nano-substructured plasmonic pore arrays: a robust, low cost route to reproducible hierarchical structures extended across macroscopic dimensions.

Plasmonic nanostructures are important across diverse applications from sensing to renewable energy. Periodic porous array structures are particularly attractive because such topography offers a means to encapsulate or capture solution phase species and combines both propagating and localised plasmonic modes offering versatile addressability. However, in analytical spectroscopic applications, periodic pore arrays have typically reported weaker plasmonic signal enhancement compared to particulate structures.