Q&A

Jim Hollenhorst is director of the Molecular Technology Laboratory and formerly director of electronics research for Agilent Technologies. From 1990 to 1999, he was manager of the superconductivity and the solid-state applications departments at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Prior to joining HP/Agilent, Hollenhorst was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he worked on Josephson junctions, metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) devices, and heterostructure photodiodes and lasers. Hollenhorst is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and holds a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in physics from Stanford University

What are the benefits of nanotech to the electronics and life sciences industries?

The DNA microarray technology is an excellent example of the application of semiconductor top-down integration techniques to make life science measurements. In Agilent’s approach, we use a form of ink-jet printing to put nucleotides wherever we want them on a wafer of glass, which is later diced into microarray chips. We exploit the molecular self-assembly techniques of nucleic acid chemistry to build up DNA polymers that form the probe that recognizes and binds the target molecule of interest (DNA or RNA). In this way, we can go directly from a computer file to an application specific chip that can perform many thousands of measurements simultaneously. We can just as easily fabricate catalog chips, such as our whole human genome arrays. Another example is our work on microfluidics for chemical analysis. Agilent has developed a number of products and applications that use lithographic techniques to build microfluidic chips that separate and detect complex chemical mixtures. With glass-based microfluidics we offer our customers solutions that use gel electrophoresis to make measurements on DNA, RNA, proteins, and even living cells. With polymer microfluidics we can concentrate nanoliter size samples, then perform chemical separation by liquid chromatography, and finally inject the samples into one of our mass spectrometers for detailed chemical analysis.