Titanium dioxide -- It slices, it dices ...

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Illustration of the cleavage of proteins near a titanium dioxide surface: when illuminated with ultraviolet light hydroxyl radicals are formed in water near the semiconductors surface and cut proteins at the location of the amino acid proline. Credit ...
Illustration of the cleavage of proteins near a titanium dioxide surface: when illuminated with ultraviolet light, hydroxyl radicals are formed in water near the semiconductor's surface and cut proteins at the location of the amino acid proline. Credit: NIST

Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for analysis. The prototype sample preparation method, detailed recently in Analytical Chemistry, uses ultraviolet light and titanium dioxide and could be ideal for new microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” devices designed to rapidly analyze minute amount of biological samples.


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