This award will provide partial support for the second Label-Free Single Molecule Sensing Gordon Research Conference, which will be held at Stonehill College from June 6–11, 2027. The first conference of this kind took place in 2025 and was a great success, providing this research community a dedicated meeting place. The 2027 conference will focus on “label-free” sensing, which addresses a key problem in studying individual molecules. Most existing techniques require attaching chemical tags or anchoring molecules in place to observe them. However, attaching a chemical tag or anchoring the molecules changes their behavior, which can make results misleading or hard to interpret. Newer techniques are making it possible to observe molecules without any attachments, giving scientists a much clearer picture of how they truly behave. This conference will build and sustain a community of researchers, from leading experts to graduate students, who share the common goal of leveraging new label-free techniques to produce tools that could transform medicine and healthcare.
The ability to precisely detect biomolecules and measure their dynamics is central to understanding biological phenomena, including the presence of debilitating diseases or environmental toxins. However, biomolecules are typically a few nanometers in size, making them difficult to observe with optical methods. One way to make them visible is to add labels, such as fluorescent tags. This has opened the field of single molecule analysis, which allows rare events to be observed and solution heterogeneity to be understood. However, labels alter the biomolecule being studied, have limited lifetime and time-resolution and add costly sample preparation steps. Label-free single molecule sensing techniques could transform biophysics and give rise to new efficient techniques for biomedical discovery. The goals of the 2027 Label-Free Single Molecule Sensing Gordon Research Conference will be to create a unique forum that brings together scientists in the field of label-free biomolecule sensing, and to educate and inspire the next generation of scientists that will advance this field, paying particular attention to creating opportunities for students and postdocs.
This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.