BU Engineer Builds Next-Gen Sensors with Mix of Living Cells and Tiny Electronics
Biomedical engineer Miguel Jimenez blends engineering fields to develop devices to monitor environmental and human health
BU Engineer Builds Next-Gen Sensors with Mix of Living Cells and Tiny Electronics
BU Engineer Builds Next-Gen Sensors with Mix of Living Cells and Tiny Electronics
For farmers, knowing the health of their soil is everything—but constantly monitoring the ground’s well-being isn’t easy. Simply looking at a field can only tell them so much, and sending samples for testing is expensive and time-consuming. Boston University biomedical engineer Miguel Jimenez has a potentially more efficient solution: mini sensors packed with cutting-edge electronics and engineered living cells that can be sprinkled throughout a field to track its health 24/7.
A BU College of Engineering assistant professor of biomedical engineering, Jimenez’s convergent research combines synthetic biology—which uses tools like genetic engineering to create new biological systems—and microelectronics to develop small devices with a range of applications. The underlying technology could one day be used to not just track environmental conditions, but also wirelessly monitor human health.
For the soil sensors, which could detect molecules like nitrogen in the soil, “the idea is that if we have these awesome, biologically, wirelessly connected sensors that live in the soil, or that can be put into the soil, people can do what’s called precision agriculture, where you can know which plants in the field need or don’t need so much management, so you can use resources more efficiently,” says Jimenez.
He and his team are also working on a sensor that would serve as a personal health monitoring device, detecting fertility hormones in blood. It could potentially lower the number of times women would need to get in-person blood draws.
The team genetically engineers cells to emit light—bioluminescence—if they are in the presence of what they’re meant to detect, such as nitrogen or fertility hormones. Combined with electronics, they can then send that data to a computer.
In order to integrate the engineered cells and the electronics, Jimenez is collaborating with Rabia Yazicigil’s WISE Circuits Lab. Yazicigil, an ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is developing custom electronic components that can detect low levels of light using low power. The goal is to use microelectronics—devices that are the size of a blueberry—to store data and wirelessly communicate the signals from the cells.
But to bring these next-gen sensors to market, Jimenez faces a couple of challenges, particularly in integrating living cells with electronics. The first obstacle is making devices that work outside the clean conditions of the lab. The cells need a wet environment, the electronics a dry one—so how do you ensure they can work together and do so in messy, potentially unstable conditions? The second is making sure any device can transfer the signal from the cell sensors to a computer.
“We’re experts in integrating these awesome biological components with electronics and making them work well,” says Jimenez. “If we’re successful in resolving these core challenges, we might be able to apply these quite widely for monitoring our world in real time in ways that we can’t do now.”
Given the technology’s broad potential, Jimenez hopes he’ll hear from experts from across BU and beyond with ideas for future collaborations and applications.
“One of the applications is sensing and detection of specific molecules in the environment,” he says, “but I think what we really need help with from the community or different fields is what to detect.”
Watch the video above to take a look inside Jimenez’s lab and explore the potential of his work.
