The implementation of the project in the first reporting period has been highly successful. My research group relocated from Zurich to Oxford as of 01.06.2018. The first few months of the project were devoted entirely to relocating and setting up the laboratory from scratch, re-building experimental set-ups and restarting experiments. One of the major fronts on which we had to invest significant effort was the transfer of our nanofabrication processes to the local cleanroom facilities.
This enterprise was successfully completed with the help of fantastic team work and significant amounts of time and effort on the part of the group members funded by the ERC. The recruited team started out with two doctoral (DPhil) students, and a postdoc working on theory and computation, all of whom transferred with the group from Zurich to Oxford. Within 6 to 9 months of moving to Oxford we had recruited two additional full-time postdocs and one part-time technician on the experimental side, and an additional PhD student with a focus on computation.
In the first phase of the project we were able to reproduce and improve upon previous electrometry measurements on single molecules in solution. In addition we counted a few major additional unpublished research achievements. We have: (1) demonstrated the ability to use electrometry to address questions related to molecular structure of nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, (2) developed a new experimental approach that facilitates the imaging of surface electrical charge distribution of material interfaces immersed in an electrolyte, and (3) made fundamental advances into the understanding key mechanisms underlying electrostatic interactions in solution. Overall, we laid the foundations for breakthroughs on three fronts comprising new technologies, fundamentally new molecular measurement ability and basic science discovery.
In the second half of the project, and towards the final phase, we had a major technological step forward that was not really anticipated prior to the project. We developed a way to use the same experimental platform use to measure charge in molecules to measure their size and shape with very high precision in the solution phase, even in samples with complex composition. We termed the method escape time size and shape spectrometry (ETsy). On a different front we carried out key experimental and theoretical work to demonstrate that electrostatic interactions in the fluid phase are far more elaborate and intricate than previously believed, thus opening doors to a major fundamental discovery in a key area of physics and chemistry, with immediate relevance in and impact on biology. The results from these two classes of breakthrough are in various stages of dissemination in the form of 5 additional papers that do not currently appear in the list of publications ensuing from the project. Furthermore the body of technological advances on the molecular measurement front are moving towards potential commercialisation. We are actively exploring avenues to bring the technology out to society potentially for use as an analytical tool in life sciences research and the pharma industry, but also exploring its potential in micro-chip based high-speed, high-sensitivity diagnostics.
