A Brown University engineering team has been awarded funding of up to $3.1 million to develop tiny electronic chips for a new way of reading proteins.
The university announced the award Oct. 27. Associate professor Jacob Rosenstein's group will design, simulate and prototype electronics that collect signals from an array of nanopores, extremely small openings used to sense molecules.
The project is led by Northeastern University's Kostas Research Institute and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.
Proteins are made from chains of amino acids. Reading their sequence directly could help researchers identify unfamiliar or modified proteins, a task that remains difficult for existing methods.
DARPA describes the wider program as an effort to develop integrated systems that translate individual molecules' physical and chemical properties into digital information.
