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.