June 19, 2014

The Sweetest Calculator in the World



Chemists let fluorescent sugar sensors ‘calculate’

In a chemistry lab at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany): Prof. Dr. Alexander Schiller works at a rectangular plastic board with 384 small wells. The chemist carefully pipets some drops of sugar solution into a row of the tiny reaction vessels. As soon as the fluid has mixed with the contents of the vessels, fluorescence starts in some of the wells. What the Junior Professor for Photonic Materials does here - with his own hands - could also be called in a very simplified way, the 'sweetest computer in the world'. The reason: the sugar molecules Schiller uses are part of a chemical sequence for information processing.