ABSTRACT
Nanosensors provide important tools for monitoring biotargets and molecular signaling processes within single living cells, thus providing the critical information that could be critical to biomedical research and clinical applications. Fiberoptic nanosensors can be fabricated to have nanoscale dimensions, which make them suitable for sensing intracellular/intercellular physiological and biological parameters in submicron environments. A large variety of beroptic chemical sensors and biosensors have been developed in our laboratory for environmental and biochemical monitoring (Vo-Dinh et al., 1987; Tromberg et al., 1988; Alarie et al., 1990a; Alarie et al., 1990b; Alarie and Vo-Dinh, 1991; Bowyer et al., 1991; Vo-Dinh et al., 1991; Vo-Dinh et al., 1993; Alarie and Vo-Dinh, 1996). Tapered bers with submicron distal diameters between 20 and 500 nm have been developed for near- eld scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) (Pohl, 1991; Betzig and Chichester, 1993). NSOM was also used to achieve sub-wavelength 100 nm spatial resolution in Raman detection (Deckert et al., 1998; Zeisel et al., 1998). Chemical nanosensors were developed for monitoring calcium and nitric oxide, among other physicochemicals in single cells (Tan et al., 1992a; Tan et al., 1992b). Vo-Dinh and coworkers have developed nanobiosensors with antibody probes to detect biochemical targets inside living single cells (Cullum et al., 2000a; Cullum and Vo-Dinh, 2000b; Vo-Dinh et al., 2000a; Vo-Dinh and Cullum, 2000b; Vo-Dinh et al., 2000c; Vo-Dinh et al., 2001; Kasili et al., 2002; Kasili et al., 2004a; Kasili and Vo-Dinh, 2004b; Song et al., 2004; Kasili and Vo-Dinh, 2005; Vo-Dinh and Kasili, 2005; Vo-Dinh et al., 2006;
Vo-Dinh, 2008). is chapter presents an overview of the principle, development, and applications of beroptic nanosensors for medicine and health-e ect studies.
