Researchers at University of Manchester and the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, have revealed an innovative approach to track individual molecule dynamics within nanofluidic structures, illuminating their response to molecules in ways never before possible.

Nanofluidics, the study of fluids confined within ultra-small spaces, offers insights into the behaviour of liquids on a nanometer scale. However, exploring the movement of individual molecules in such confined environments has been challenging due to the limitations of conventional microscopy techniques. This obstacle prevented real-time sensing and imaging, leaving significant gaps in our knowledge of molecular properties in confinement.

A team led by Professor Radha Boya in the Department of Physics at The University of Manchester makes nanochannels which are only one-atom to few-atom thin using two-dimensional materials as building blocks.

Prof Boya said: “Seeing is believing, but it is not easy to see confinement effects at this scale. We make these extremely thin slit-like channels, and the current study shows an elegant way to visualise them by super-resolution microscopy.”

The study‘s findings are published in the journal Nature Materials.

The partnership with the EPFL team allowed for optical probing of these systems, uncovering hints of liquid ordering induced by confinement.

Thanks to an unexpected property of boron nitride, a graphene-like 2D material which possesses a remarkable ability to emit light when in contact with liquids, researchers at EPFL‘s Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology (LBEN) have succeeded in directly observing and tracing the paths of individual molecules within nanofluidic structures.

This revelation opens the door to a deeper understanding of the behaviours of ions and molecules in conditions that mimic biological systems.