Propelling Microdroplets for Chemical and Biological Studies

Microdroplets are ubiquitous in nature and often play important roles in atmospheric chemistry. The propulsion of microdroplets in the air by spray processes has stimulated many analytical studies, including the breakthrough development of soft ionization techniques. Recent advances in microdroplet chemistry hinted at the mysterious nature of water microdroplets, which is strikingly different than the corresponding bulk phase. This talk will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art microdroplet technologies exploited in our laboratory recently to intercept chemical and biological events, which are otherwise challenging to probe. For example, we made water microdroplets behave like superacids to capture and stabilize extremely short-live carbocations formed as elusive intermediates in chemical reactions. While many intensive attempts in the past failed to capture or underestimated the co-populated intermediate conformers from the protein folding/unfolding reaction, we succeeded with microdroplet techniques to kinetically trap, resolve, and quantify protein conformers in equilibrium that evolve during unfolding in solution. We have also used propelled microdroplets to extract biochemical species from tissue surface for their subsequent detection by mass spectrometry for biomedical applications, such as understanding the molecular aberration in the human hippocampus during temporal lobe epilepsy, evaluating nephrotic syndrome, and developments of cancer diagnostics.

About the Speaker:
Shibdas Banerjee completed his M.Sc. in Chemistry from IIT Roorkee, India, in 2008 and Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai under Prof. Shyamalava Mazumdar, in 2014. Then he worked with Prof. Richard N. Zare as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, USA. He joined the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Tirupati as an assistant professor of chemistry in 2017. Shibdas is involved in developing ambient ionization mass spectrometric methodologies and imaging techniques for biomedical applications. His group is also engaged in the area of mechanistic organic chemistry, microdroplet chemistry, and analytical methodology development for high-throughput screening assay.