An award is made to Texas A&M University to develop a new and unique instrument which will be sought by users within and outside Texas A&M University and provide unsurpassed capabilities for the cutting-edge research and education in the areas of molecular and cellular biology, agriculture, engineering, medicine, and national defense. The new instrumentation is unique in many aspects, and it is anticipated that it will play a major role in developing new approaches for high-throughput cellular analysis, which are in high demand in biology and medicine. One of the thrust areas of emerging applications for this instrument is lipidomics. Microbes (both natural and engineered) that can convert biomass into oil offer the promise of achieving sustainable oil production and enhancing domestic energy independence. The newly developed instrument will substantially enhance the University infrastructure by uniting several Colleges, Institutes and Centers. This project will support broader impacts that promote the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public. Specifically, this project will provide research opportunities and training for highly motivated undergraduates across several colleges and research disciplines; provide unique educational opportunities for students from the Texas Rio Grande Valley and the United States-Mexico border region, which includes the most economically disadvantaged areas of the country according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The results will be broadly disseminated through publications, public presentations, tutorial, and hands-on training seminars. Finally, findings from this research will be disseminated to the public through broadcasted segments on "Invisible Jungle", an undergraduate-produced radio program that is carried weekly on the local National Public Radio Affiliate, KAMU radio (College Station, Texas).
Identification, classification and sorting live cells are activities of considerable research and commercial interest. Chemical composition and elasticity in cells play an important role our classification and our understanding of function. Conventional analysis of the chemical composition of cells involves the use of molecular labels or analytical approaches that destroy cell viability. Similarly, the conventional analysis of biomechanical or elastic properties of biological materials involves labor intensive and slow approaches. No commercial instrument exists to assess those properties at a high throughput rate (>1000 cells per second) and non-invasively. The potential demand for such instrumentation is enormous, since almost every research/industrial/clinical lab relies on cell sorting. By providing additional capabilities, the newly developed instrument will also fill existing gaps in instrumentation. Innovations in scientific instrumentation often share several key features. First, these innovations perform measurements that were previously impossible. Second, they perform analyses at low cost with unprecedented throughput. Finally, instrumentation innovations address an important scientific need. Here, we will develop a transformative technology platform that contains all of the hallmarks of innovation in scientific instrumentation, and as such, has the potential to significantly advance life science, biomedical and engineering research. The overall instrument will be composed of two parts: (1) an optical sensing unit optimized for (a) chemical analysis of cells by means of coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering spectroscopy, and (b) biophysical measurements of elasticity in cells through coherent Brillouin scattering; and (2) multifunctional microfluidic devices providing standardized platforms for cell delivery, sorting, and in situ validation of cell?s elastic properties. The newly developed instruments will also be validated using biological samples.
