Brian demonstrates how he gets to use gold in his research.

Brian Clare loves being a nanotechnologist. "Work is really fun. I never thought science would be this day-to-day interesting."

Perhaps that's because on any given day, Brian might feel like he's discovered something at the end of the rainbow or is watching a 1960s rock video. His nanotechnology research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Abbott has him regularly dealing with pots of nearly pure gold and images that call to mind psychedelic rock posters of an earlier era.

In addition to being enjoyable, Brian's work as a graduate student in the Materials Chemistry Division of the Department of Chemistry could also someday improve our health by offering us insight into the communication pathways of cells. "Cells in our body are constantly receiving messages - from the environment and from other cells," explains Brian. "I am interested in cell-signaling processes, how they relate to human diseases like cancer and diabetes, and how to design new tools for studying and treating these diseases."

If something goes wrong in this communication system, like too many messages instructing cells to grow and divide, diseases like cancer can result. Brian wants to simplify current diagnostic tools that check for activity in the cell-signaling pathway. He also hopes his research will make it possible to use these diagnostic tools to test for drugs that could prevent over activity in cell communication. Although existing techniques are accurate, Brian says, "They use expensive materials and fancy instrumentation." In contrast, the UW graduate student's research uses liquid crystals, an inexpensive material commonly found in laptop screens and digital watches.

While this testing process works fairly well as it is, Brian wants to modify it to make it easier and cheaper to use and to make it useful for testing drugs that might stop the kinase from working. A successful simplification of this tool would allow scientists to conduct thousands of diagnostic experiments at a time. In order to achieve this, Brian has to go through numerous steps, building his experiment literally nano layer by nano layer.

The first step is to prepare the surface, which Brian accomplishes by using a metal evaporator, a machine that uses extremely low pressure (a high vacuum) to create an ultra pure environment. "It's really important not to have any contaminations," says Brian.

Brian sets up the metal evaporator for the next round of wafers.

The gold-plated wafers inside the machine.

Inside the large gray machine is a 99.999% pure pot of gold. When an electric current hits this treasure, gold atoms become excited, fly up, and coat a silicon wafer with a 20 nanometer-thin layer of the precious metal. Because of the way the atoms land on the glass slide, this process also makes the nanoscale landscape Brian needs later in the experiment - nanometer-sized hills spaced five to 30 nanometers apart. The result is a research tool seems that more appropriate for a gilded royal palace than a science lab.

The next step for Brian is to coat his gold-plated wafer with a solution of water and one or two kinds of peptides. After two hours, the peptides chemically attach to the surface, and it's on to step three, where Brian immerses the slide in another solution, this time with kinase and a phosphate source. During these two hours, the kinase does its job and adds a phosphate to some of the peptides.

In order to use this colorful visualization technique, Brian adds one more step to his preparation. Currently, liquid crystals can't recognize the peptides themselves, so Brian introduces antibodies, which are larger proteins, into the mix. He immerses the coated slide into a liquid with antibodies, which bind to the phosphate group on the peptides. This in turn makes the liquid crystal particularly sensitive to the phosphorylated peptide.

Brian uses a polarizing microscope to see the nanoscale changes that have occurred on the glass slide. "This is how we detect protein/peptide binding events," he explains. The liquid crystals become confused when they encounter a peptide/phosphate/antibody complex and the molecules don't align correctly. This shows up as a black dot in a sea of bright green, yellow, and pink, which gives Brian his yes or no answer of whether or not a peptide received a phosphate.

Brian uses the polarizing microscope to see the liquid crystals as they react to the peptide-antibody complexes.

Brian puts pictures of the LCs on television monitor to make them easier to see.

The polarizing microscope pictures of the liquid crystals look like lava lamps with swirling bright colors. "It's pretty trippy," says Brian. "It's like a 60s rock poster or something." The variety of colors in the liquid crystal represents different textures on the slide surface, which allows Brian to understand what is going on at the nanoscale surface of the slide.

Many nanotechnology researchers believe that thinking about the nanoworld holds the promise of helping us fight diseases through better diagnostics tools and better medications. For Brian, this exciting opportunity to increase the efficiency of current medical testing, along with the colorful, swirling images and his frequent use of gold-plated materials, make nanotechnology an exciting and enjoyable field of research.