Nanoplex: Biotech barcodes

The metal nanoparticle technologies that Michael Natan developed in his lab at Pennsylvania State University were originally brought into SurroMed Inc. to help the company measure small samples. But in January, the board decided that Surromed's phenotyping technology and the nanoparticle technologies couldn't be developed simultaneously. As a result, Nanoplex Technologies Inc. was born.

Nanoplex owns four technologies developed by CEO Natan, of which he says the Nanobarcodes is the most interesting. Nanobarcodes are cylindrically shaped nanometal particles used for tagging both biological and non-biological molecules. But instead of conventional black-and-white bar codes, the coding is achieved by alternating two or more different metals, such as gold or silver, of varying width and number of stripes per bar. The coding is read based on the differing reflectivity of the adjacent metal stripes...