A colleague and I were discussing some ideas for this nanotechnology blog when we jokingly commented that if we wrote it about the Super Bowl we would probably get a lot more people tuning in to read it.  Out of sheer curiousity I ran a quick Google check on football and nanotechnology and found this interesting article about a contest being run by the American Physical Society.  http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=807

One can win the smallest trophy ever made and a $1000 in cash by creating a video that demonstrates some aspect of physics in American football.  The winner will be announced on Super Bowl Sunday.  Sounds like fun!  Time to dig out your camcorder and go to work. 

The trophy will be built at the Cornell NanoScale Facility (CNF) on a silicon wafer in the shape of a football field.  In case you win the world’s smallest trophy - Agilent would be very happy to sell you an atomic force microscope so you can see it!  (How’s that for a shameless plug!)

When one talks about nanotechnology it’s usually about building something small, maybe out of nanotubes or nanoparticles.  It’s about creating a structure that is stronger, lighter weight, more durable, more flexible, or in some way better when built from the ground up.  It’s rarely (if ever) about tearing something apart or breaking something down into smaller elements. 

 In the world of proteomics it’s about studying proteins, particularly their structures and the role they play in living organisms.  It’s about finding a specific protein of interest in a complex sample, or more specifically separating the protein of interest away from the abundant proteins in the sample.  Not exactly separating the men from the boys or the forest from the trees - but rather it’s the inverse.  It’s separating the baby from the giants or the needle away from the stack of logs.  Not an easy task when you’re dealing with nanoscale devices like proteins.   

 In this article a group at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, used a liquid chromatograph-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) instrument with three columns to find the protein of interest.  They were able to separate the specific protein of interest away from the huge number of abundant proteins in the sample. 

Check out the application examples on the Agilent Nanotechnology website (www.agilent.com/find/nano) or click here to see this specific example of using an LC-MS for nanotechnology research.