JPhys Photonics (Jan 2024)

Portable fiber-based double nanohole optical tweezer for trapping small proteins

  • Veerpal Kaur,
  • Demelza Wright,
  • Samuel Mathew,
  • Matthew Peters,
  • Maria Zacharopoulou,
  • Shang Hua Yang,
  • Laura S Itzhaki,
  • Ivet Bahar,
  • Reuven Gordon

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7647/ad5bd0
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 3
p. 035023

Abstract

Read online

We demonstrate the trapping and analysis of individual proteins using a portable optical fiber tweezer setup with a double-nanohole in a gold film coating the fiber’s end and aligned with the fiber core. The instrument was used to trap and analyze cytochrome c, carbonic anhydrase, bovine serum albumin, and PR65 (wild-type and various point mutants). This approach was compared with a free-space optical tweezer setup that requires alignment of the laser focus to the aperture, whereas the fiber-based approach is both portable and alignment-free, which holds promise for applications in antibody discovery, small molecule drug discovery, protein interaction analysis and other applications using the standard well-plate format.

Keywords