Biomotor-driven transport of molecular beacons

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 56 KB
• Volume: 99
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0006-3592
• DOI: 10.1002/bit.21787

✦ Synopsis

Biomolecular motor-driven transport provides an attractive alternative to pressure-driven flow in microfluidic devices because kinesins can transport microtubules up concentration gradients and against bulk fluid flow in micron-scale channels. One envisioned application of this marriage of biology and technology is a microscale biosensor that facilitates capture, detection and transport of mRNA or single-stranded DNA. These hybrid ''lab-on-a-chip'' systems could be used as viral detectors or as analytical tools to assay gene expression profiles in minute tissue samples. In this issue, Raab and Hancock show that microtubules can be coated with molecular beacons and that these beacon-functionalized microtubules are transported across a bed of immobilized kinesin motors. Furthermore, the beacons retained their function and increased their fluorescence in the presence of complementary single-stranded oligonucleotides. This work is an important step toward developing hybrid devices that use the transport machinery from eukaryotic cells to concentrate and detect nucleotide targets.