M2 Grant awarded to Dr Lisa Tran & Dr Siddharth Deshpande (UU/WUR)

There is an urgent need to make biosensors fast, affordable, and sensitive, while maintaining molecular specificity. Here, we will use liquid crystals, famous for display technologies, to produce color-changing emulsions as biosensing platforms that address these needs. Using high-resolution microscopy, spectroscopy, and lab-on-a-chip technologies, we will systematically characterize how chiral liquid crystals are impacted by target molecule structures to produce diverse color-changing signals. Beyond the innovation of accessible, specific, and quantitative biosensors, our findings will shed light on chiral organization in crowded environments, relevant to biological systems.