Advances Toward Development of "Smart Dust" Biosensors

Progress has been made toward meeting several technical challenges in a continuing effort to develop “smart dust” sensors for remote detection of chemical and biological agents. Until now, the state of the art of laboratory-on-a-chip devices has been typified by microfluidic cartridges variously mounted in or connected to desktop or handheld devices. Smart dust sensors would be smaller: they would be submillimeter-sized devices, the implementation of which would necessitate levels of miniaturization and integration heretofore known only in biological systems.