Researchers at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories has tested the adhesion of amino acids to semiconductors, metals and insulators used in electronic devices. The team used their results to design an inorganic nanostructure that selectively bound to a particular primary peptide sequence.

Their results could have applications ranging from biomolecular detection to biomolecular manipulation and basic biological molecule studies, such as X-ray analysis of proteins or intracellular peptide assays.