We demonstrate a silicon nitride trench waveguide deposited with bowtie antennas for plasmonic enhanced optical trapping. The sub-micron silicon nitride trench waveguides were fabricated with conventional optical lithography in a low cost manner. The waveguides embrace not only low propagation loss and high nonlinearity, but also the inborn merits of combining micro-fluidic channel and waveguid...

The African buffalo, Syncerus caffer, is one of the most abundant and ecologically important species of megafauna in the savannah ecosystem. It is an important prey species, as well as a host for a vast array of nematodes, pathogens and infectious diseases, such as bovine tuberculosis and corridor disease. Large-scale SNP discovery in this species would greatly facilitate further research into ...

MOTIVATION Discovering variation among high-throughput sequenced genomes relies on efficient and effective mapping of sequence reads. The speed, sensitivity and accuracy of read mapping are crucial to determining the full spectrum of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) as well as structural variants (SVs) in the donor genomes analyzed. RESULTS We present drFAST, a read mapper designed for di-ba...

We propose and demonstrate a trapping configuration integrating coupled waveguides and gold bowtie structures to form near-field plasmonic tweezers. Compared with excitation from the top, waves coupled through the waveguide can excite specific bowties on the waveguide and trap particles precisely. Thus this scheme is more efficient and compact, and will assist the circuit design on a chip. With...

We present a novel cost-efficient method for the fabrication of high-quality self-aligned plasmonic nanopores by means of an optically controlled dielectric breakdown. Excitation of a plasmonic bowtie nanoantenna on a dielectric membrane localizes the high-voltage-driven breakdown of the membrane to the hotspot of the enhanced optical field, creating a nanopore that is automatically self-aligne...

Optical lithography, the enabling process for defining features, has been widely used in semiconductor industry and many other nanotechnology applications. Advances of nanotechnology require developments of high-throughput optical lithography capabilities to overcome the optical diffraction limit and meet the ever-decreasing device dimensions. We report our recent experimental advancements to s...

The use of a priori knowledge in the alignment of targeted sequencing data is investigated using computational experiments. Adapting a Needleman-Wunsch algorithm to incorporate the genomic position information from the targeted capture, we demonstrate that alignment can be done to just the target region of interest. When in addition use is made of direct string comparison, an improvement of up ...