Columbia University has announced a three-year, $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to advance the efforts of a team of researchers working to combine biological components with solid-state electronics.

The grant will support the team's efforts to combine complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology — the core technology behind the integrated circuits that power computing and communications devices — and certain functions natural to living systems, such as the senses of taste and smell and the use of biochemical energy sources, that cannot be replicated by CMOS solid-state electronics. By combining biological electronic devices and CMOS, the researchers hope to create new systems not possible with either technology alone and, ultimately, autonomous hybrid "cells" that could exist as probes in living organisms.

To be led by Ken Shepard, professor of electrical and biomedical engineering, the team will include Virginia W. Cornish, Helena Rubinstein Professor of Chemistry, and Lars Dietrich, assistant professor of biological sciences. "Just in the short term, this work has the potential to impact many biotechnology applications seeking to replace fluorescence-based diagnostics with electronic ones," said Shepard, whose team has a long history of developing solid-state interfaces to biological and biomolecular systems.

"Modularity exists in both the biological and solid-state domains, thus enabling components to be easily reassembled to change functionality," said Cornish, whose group has conducted pioneering research in synthetic biology, with an emphasis on directed evolution. "The engineered interaction of the heterogeneous biological with the simple, but massively integrable and robust solid-state enables new capabilities not possible with either material system alone."