\u201cMost people are familiar with silicon as being the material inside your computer, but it has endless uses,\u201d she said. \u201cWith our nanoscale porous silicon, we\u2019ve created these nanoscale holes that are a thousand times smaller than your hair. Those selectively capture molecules when pre-treated with the appropriate surface coating, darkening the silicon, which the app detects.\u201d<\/p>\n Similar technology being developed relies on expensive hardware that compliments the smart phone. Weiss\u2019 system uses the phone\u2019s flash as a light source, and the team plans to develop an app that could handle all data processing necessary to confirm that the film simply darkened with the adding of fluid. What\u2019s more, in the future, such a phone could replace a mass spectrometry system that costs thousands of dollars. The Transportation Security Administration owns hundreds of those at airports across the country, where they\u2019re used to detect gunpowder on hand swabs.<\/p>\n Other home tests rely on a color change, which is a separate chemical reaction that introduces more room for error, Weiss said.<\/p>\n Weiss, Ph.D. student Tengfei Cao, and their team used a biotin-streptavidin protein assay and an iPhone SE, model A1662, to test their silicon films and found the accuracy to be similar to that of benchtop measurement systems.\u00a0<\/strong>They also used a 3D printed box to stabilize the phone and get standardized measurements for the paper, but Weiss said that wouldn\u2019t be necessary if further research and development led to a commercialized version.<\/p>\n Their results will appear in a future edition of\u00a0Analyst<\/em>, one in the Royal Society of Chemistry family of journals. An early version is available online\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This work was funded by Army Research Office grant W911NF-15-1-0176 and National Science Foundation grant DMR-1263182.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-news\/20190610171141\/Silicon1-600x600.jpg\")