Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The long-term goal of my research program is to develop smart biosensing technologies with multifunctional capabilities to characterize and detect small molecules and study their interactions with complex biological environment. Smart biosensors sense molecules in biocomponents and possess features such as sensitivity, specificity, rapidity, and more. To achieve these features, molecules in a complex environment (the complete system) must be characterized for their physical-chemical interactions providing key information on their mechanical, structural, chemical and optical properties. Eg., cannabinoids in the blood change the mechanical environment of the blood vessels. Hence, these fundamental studies are vital to make extensive correlations between the different properties. This will help understand mechanisms originating at the nanoscale. Presently, there does not exist a technique that can characterize all these physical-chemical properties of soft material systems at the nanoscale. To address this gap, my proposed 5-year program will develop new Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Raman spectroscopy modalities under one characterization platform to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the nanoscale properties. We will test our platform with cannabinoids interacting with model vascular environment since increased cannabinoid consumption leads to cardiovascular diseases. Thus, monitoring of cannabinoids in blood and studying its interaction dynamics with blood vessels is crucial. This will be achieved by 3 short-term objectives 1. Developing Intermodulation-AFM (ImAFM) to simultaneously characterize structural and viscoelastic properties of PAA-collagen gel interacting with cannabinoids. 2. Employing Raman spectroscopy to study vibrational modes of cannabinoids in blood and then combining it with ImAFM to correlate chemical and mechanical properties of PAA-collagen gel-cannabinoid system 3. Merging of a frequency tunable laser with the ImAFM-Raman system to create Raman-Photo-induced Force Microscopy (PiFM) and visualizing optical properties of nanostructured substrates and applying it to the PAA-collagen gel-cannabinoid system Impact My research advances the current capabilities of Raman and AFM techniques to characterize structural, viscoelastic, chemical and optical properties simultaneously for the first time. As a result, these surface properties measured at the nanoscale can be determined for challenging and complex systems like soft biomaterials interacting with small molecules. Moreover, it is anticipated that the exploitation of plasmonic surface enhancement will increase signal values by 7-8 orders of magnitude thus significantly reducing damage of soft samples. The development of these technique will facilitate fundamental studies of different chemicals, drugs and biohazards which will help in building smart sensors. The smart sensors for cannabinoids will provide appropriate and evidence-based means of Canadian law enforcement.