Gregory Timp, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biological Sciences, and Jun Li, Associate Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, form an interdisciplinary team and receive $1.75 million R01 grant from NIH as two principal investigators.
In this project, PIs Timp and Li plan to develop a tool that uses a nanopore to interrogate the secretome of single cells with extreme, single molecule sensitivity and high throughput. The blockades that develop in the ionic current through a nanopore, when a secreted, charged molecule is impelled through it by an electric field, measure the molecular volumes occluding the pore. With a set of new statistical models and algorithms that will be developed by Li, a catalog of the blockades acquired by Timp with a nanopore will be used to discriminate between different cellular phenotypes non-destructively, quickly, in real-time, and to interrogate the secretome for specific biomarkers.
Originally published by at acms.nd.edu on March 12, 2019.