Modification, Characterization and Handling of Protein Molecules as the First Step to Bioelectronic Devices

Abstract

Molecular electronic devices (MED) have attracted many researchers in both academia and industries since Dr. Forrest Carter of Naval Research Laboratory (USA) organized 1st International Workshop on MED in 1981 (Carter, 1982). A number of international conferences, symposia, forums and/or workshops have been organized since then (Table 1), and various approaches to realize MED have been discussed from the viewpoint of molecular design, molecular assembly, characterization and device design. However, still there are a lot of problems to show a prototype device. When biological molecules including proteins and enzymes are used instead of synthetic organic molecules, MED can be called bioelectronic devices (BED). Compared to MED, BED have shown some outputs such as biosensors, but this is far from the real molecular electronics.