Traditional bulk diagnostic assays suffer from signal dilution and averaging, making it difficult to detect rare biomarkers and subtle molecular variations critical for early disease diagnosis. Microarrays address this limitation by enabling high-throughput, multiplexed analysis with improved specificity and sensitivity. Their structured array format...

Self-assembling nucleic acid molecules have been utilized extensively for constructing unique nanoscale structures, and designing increasingly complex structures is a top nanotechnology challenge. Current methods to create NDA nanostructures are restricted to discrete domains of parallel lines as a result of the double crossover based unit motif, which...

Many early stage cancers have a high rate of survival if promptly diagnosed and treated. Survival rates for stage 1-3 breast cancer can be as high as 95% at the 5 year mark. Unfortunately, late stage cancers have a much lower survival rate; stage 4 breast cancer only has about a 20% survival rate at the 5 year mark. Metastatic cancers pose a particularly...

High throughput parallel assays are needed to effectively identify and study biomolecules and their activity. Typically it takes a large number of repeated assays to get statistically significant data for studying biomolecules. However, fewer assays would be needed to get statistically meaningful results if the data were of higher quality. Because of...

Telomeres, tandem repeats at the ends of chromatids, are a particular point of interest in the science of aging and cancer. Telomeric DNA is lost during cellular replication, resulting in shortened chromatid length and cessation of cell division. Many age-related diseases are linked to shortened telomeres. Conversely, many cancer cells demonstrate elongated...

Interest in visualizing and analyzing individual biomolecules has increased significantly in the past twenty years or so, especially for DNA. Single molecule DNA imaging is critical for studying the biophysical and biochemical properties of DNA and for developing new applications. Typically DNA is imaged using fluorescence which has limited contrast...