Glasgow engineers are to share in a £18 M nationwide initiative to set up new interdisciplinary research collaborations in nanotechnology.

The £18M is divided equally between two consortia. One, in bionanotechnlogy, involves Glasgow, Oxford and York Universities, with links to the Universities of Cambridge, Nottingham and Southampton. Glasgow receives £3M over six years.

"The University of Glasgow has had a world class activity in both bioelectronics and nanoelectronics for the last 15 years" says Professor Jon Cooper of the Department of Electronics & Electrical Engineering. "To date, the Department of Electronics has had important strategic collaborations in these new "emergent" areas of engineering working with industries and organisations as diverse as IBM, NASA, Glaxo SmithKline, Motorola, Siemens, Kodak and Unilever. The exciting aspect of this project, in Bionanotechnology, is that it will enable members of the department to bring together these two important areas of technology."

The Glasgow group, led by Professor Jon Cooper with a team of six other academics, will seek to combine expertise in nanotechnology, lab-on-a-chip and biosensors in order to develop a series of extremely sensitive tools for biologists. "We hope to develop a range of methods that will enable us to manipulate and measure single biological molecules. These will help us to understand the nature of how the genetic code controls the behaviour of cells as well as, more broadly, how the activity of drugs controls cell metabolism."

The work will also draw upon expertise of collaborators in the area of the molecular and physical sciences at Oxford, of medical research at the National Institute for Medical Research, London, and of biologists at York.

These Interdiscliplinary Research Collaborations are funded by three of the Government's Science Research Councils (EPSRC and BBSRC based in Swindon, and MRC based in London) and the Ministry of Defence.

The essence of this research is to make and use structures at the nanometre scale (1 nm = a billionth of a metre, that is, ten thousandths the diameter of a human hair). It's a multidisciplinary field involving materials scientists, chemists, physicists, molecular biologists, engineers and applied mathematicians.

The enormous advances made during the last twenty years mean that the tools to make and measure infinitesimally small objects have become commonplace. It is now expected that there will be extraordinary advances in manufacturing using these tools: computers will shrink, medical diagnosis and treatment will be almost instantaneous and non-invasive, energy wastage will be dramatically reduced and our environment will become increasingly clean. The UK must maintain a leading role in defining this new technology, which is why the setting up of these collaborations is so significant in the view of the research councils.

The Consortium in Bionanotechnology which includes Glasgow is directed by Professor John Ryan, Head of Condensed Matter Physics and Head of the Physics Department at Oxford University.

"Biological materials, such as enzymes and proteins, have many remarkable advantages;" said Professor Ryan, "they undergo highly controlled assembly on an atom by atom basis, which makes them idea for applications in nanotechnology. Evolution in the natural world has produced an astonishing variety of biomolecular nano-devices including molecular motors and membrane proteins such as ion channels, hormone receptors and photoreceptors. Our goal is to understand the structure and function of these biological devices and use nature's solutions in advancing science and engineering in areas as diverse as electronics, biosensors, genomics and diagnostics."

The concept of Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations involves bringing together people from different disciplines, different departments, and institutions, to look into new areas of science and technology.

The other consortium is in nanotechnology and is led by Cambridge University, with UCL and the University of Bristol.

In order to get funding these two collaborations had to compete with 14 other outline proposals.

The Consortia will be supported with "ring-fenced" funding for up to six years, after which they will revert to conventional means of support.

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Further information from the University Press Office: 0141 330 3535

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the largest of the United Kingdom?s seven government-funded research councils. Its mission is to support the highest quality research and related postgraduate training in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC aims to advance knowledge and technology and to provide trained engineers and scientists for the benefit of the United Kingdom and the quality of life of its citizens. It has the further role of promoting public awareness of engineering and the physical sciences. Website address for more information : www.epsrc.ac.uk/

For more information contact :

Mike Brown, University of Glasgow Press Office:

0141 330 3535

Professor Jon Cooper, Department of Electronics & Electrical Engineering, University of Glasgow. 0141 330 4931

j.cooper@elec.gla.ac.uk

Jane Reck, EPSRC Press Officer, :

tel: 01793 444312. :

e-mail: jane.reck@epsrc.ac.uk :

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK?s leading funding agency for research in the non-medical life sciences. BBSRC research underpins industries in the agricultural, bioprocessing, chemical, food, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. www.bbsrc.ac.uk/ The Medical Research Council (MRC) is a national organisation funded by the UK tax-payer. Its business is medical research aimed at improving human health; everyone stands to benefit from the outputs. The research it supports and the scientists it trains meet the needs of the health services, the pharmaceutical and other health-related industries and the academic world. www.mrc.ac.uk

First published: 14 June 2001