Molecular detection and amplification by chain reaction of nanoparticles

In nature, cooperation between organisms often allows a community to achieve goals that are beyond the sum of capabilities of each participant. The need and potential of cooperating nanoparticles is easily imagined, yet the details of such cooperation are far from obvious. The talk will present a simple scheme of cooperating nanoparticles that can be used for highly sensitive detection or for  mass amplification. We consider simple nanoparticles that were typically designed for targeted drug delivery. These particles store a small amount of molecules and release them in response to an external trigger. Such nanoparticles have already been presented using various technologies. While each nanoparticle has limited capabilities, the whole system establishes a complex behavior through cooperation between the nanoparticles. We will show that, depending on the network parameters, the network can implement a mass amplifier (that releases an amount of molecules that is proportional to the input mass) or a binary detector (that generates a macro level response to the presence of a small mass of target molecules). The talk will address the implementation aspects and the mathematical analysis aspects.