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M2 Grant awarded to Dr Lisa Tran & Dr Siddharth Deshpande (UU/WUR)
A Twist in the Tail: Exploring Chiral Interactions in Liquid Crystals for Biosensing
There is an urgent need to make biosensors fast, affordable, and sensitive, while maintaining molecular specificity. Here, we will use liquid crystals, famous for display technologies, to produce color-changing emulsions as biosensing platforms that address these needs. Using high-resolution microscopy, spectroscopy, and lab-on-a-chip technologies, we will systematically characterize how chiral liquid crystals are impacted by target molecule structures to produce diverse color-changing signals. Beyond the innovation of accessible, specific, and quantitative biosensors, our findings will shed light on chiral organization in crowded environments, relevant to biological systems.