Biological physics

News and Updates

NIST Researchers Develop a Breakthrough COVID-19 Detection Technology

October 2, 2023

“Only connect” is the most famous line in the British novelist E. M. Forster’s writings. Forster was urging the readers of his book Howard’s End to make

white matter mimic in the bottom half of the artificial cranium

Lessons from an Experimental Brain Phantom

July 12, 2023

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and colleagues have developed a novel, anatomically accurate reference model of the

New NIST Licensing Opportunity Teems with Potential Applications

July 5, 2023

Max Planck, one of the Twentieth Century’s most eminent physicists, observed, "An experiment is a question that science poses to Nature, and a measurement is

Projects and Programs

Molecular Physiology

Ongoing

The natural world is a magnificent place with observable, via measurement and inference, physical structures spanning at least 43 orders of magnitude in space

Calibration Services: National Air-Kerma Standard for Electronic Brachytherapy

Ongoing

The Dosimetry Group calibrates well-type ionization chambers using Xoft miniature x-ray sources, which provide low-energy x-rays (< 50 keV) for electronic

Nano-biophotonics for molecular imaging

Ongoing

Biophotonics is at the intersection of photonics and biology where light is used to image, detect, and manipulate biological materials. This project addresses

Protocol for Preparing Fibrillar Collagen Matrices on Untreated Polystyrene Labware (Petri)*: A Potential Reference Extracellular Matrix With Robust and Reproducible Cell Responses

Ongoing

Background: Collagen type 1 is the most prevalent extracellular protein in connective tissue, and is part of the family of collagens that are fibril forming

Publications

Engineering Nanopore Approaches toward Protein Sequencing

July 25, 2023

Author(s)

Xiaojun Wei, Tadas Penkauskas, Joseph Reiner, Mark Uline, Qian Wang, Sheng Li, Aleksei Aksimentiev, Joseph Robertson, Chang Liu

Biotechnological innovations have vastly improved the capacity to perform large-scale protein studies, while the methods we have of identifying and quantifying

Microfluidic techniques for mechanical measurements of biological samples

January 20, 2023

Author(s)

Paul Salipante

The use of microfluidics to make mechanical property measurements is increasingly common. Fabrication of microfluidic devices has enabled various types of flow

Single-particle studies of the effects of RNA–protein interactions on the self-assembly of RNA virus particles

September 19, 2022

Author(s)

Rees Garmann, Aaron Goldfain, Cheylene Tanimoto, Christian Beren, Fernando Vasquez, Daniel Villarreal, Charles Knobler, William Gelbart, Vinothan Manoharan

Polydimethylsiloxane tissue-mimicking phantoms with tunable optical properties

July 1, 2022

Author(s)

Aaron Goldfain, Paul Lemaillet, David W. Allen, Kimberly Briggman, Jeeseong C. Hwang

We report on techniques to manufacture and characterize solid tissue-mimicking phantoms of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymers. Tunability of the absorption (

Software

NIST's Integrated Colony Enumerator (NICE)

January 4, 2021

Enumeration of bacterial colonies on an agar plate is simple in concept, but automated colony counting is difficult due to variations in colony color, size

Tools and Instruments

Beamline 10: Quantitative Hyperspectral Infrared Microscopy

The new beamline 10, currently under construction, is intended for applications that make use of the super-thermal brightness from SURF in the near- to mid