Nano reaction vessels could cut down solvent use and seek out new drugs.

Solvent swilling chemistry is not popular these days and so Swiss researchers have come up with nano-vessels that enable large numbers of chemical reactions to be done simultaneously with only tiny concentrations of solvent.

The team, led by Dimitrios Stamou and Horst Vogel from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, has also created a new version of the technology for screening potential drugs.

The nano vessels, which hold an attolitre (1 x 10 ^-18 l) of solvent, consist of lipid bilayers with biotin molecules in their bases. To anchor the vessels, Stamou and Vogel got IBM in Zurich to print nano-dots of protein solution, bovine serum albumin coupled to biotin, on the surface of a glass plate. Next, they added streptavidin, a molecular glue that binds strongly and selectively to biotin, and found that each vessel not only retained its contents but also stayed anchored to its protein dot.

The research team has now developed vessels that can release several different chemicals on demand, notes Stamou. The lipid-bilayer system can be used to study any water-based reaction, he claims, but its biggest application is likely to be in studying protein reactions and interactions.

Stamou and Vogel are also developing 'biological' cells for screening potential drugs. Unlike real cells, which evolve continuously and need precisely defined conditions to survive, Stamou describes his team's nano-cells as 'extremely robust and stable'. He adds: 'Everything that a cell is doing during its life can be studied in these biocompatible artificial containers'. A patent for the work has already been granted.

Tony Cass, professor of biological sciences at Imperial College London, told Chemistry World that 'although all of the components had previously been described in the literature, the real contribution of this work has been to show how they can be put together in a robust fashion and with performance characteristics that suggest they will be rugged enough to use in high throughput assays of various kinds'.

Emma Davies