Chemists develop device to isolate single target molecule
A team of chemists at Imperial College London has found a way to quickly detect trace amounts of chemicals, including pollutants, explosives or illegal drugs. The method, recently presented in the journal Nature Materials, gives scientists the means to isolate a single target molecule from 10,000 trillion water molecules within milliseconds. They do this by trapping the target molecule on a self-assembling single layer of gold nanoparticles. This study was funded in part by a European Research Council (ERC) grant.









