Xiangwei Zhao

Abstract: Plasmonics is a branch of optics that primarily utilizes surface plasmons (SPs) to confine, conduct, and manipulate external electromagnetic fields at the nanoscale, enabling the exploration of interactions between light and matter. Plasmonic nanomaterials, owing to their excellent near-field enhancement, photothermal effect, and optical force effect, hold broad application prospects in fields such as energy, catalysis, optics, and biomedicine. In this study, leveraging the efficient photothermal effect of surface plasmons, we designed and fabricated a photothermal fiber with broadband light absorption capability, achieving ultrafast photothermal PCR based on a white LED. Our results show that this photothermal fiber material can reduce the PCR detection time to within 10 minutes while enabling fluorescence or colorimetric detection of the amplification products. More importantly, the photothermal fiber-based PCR also allows the integration of bacterial photothermal lysis and PCR amplification in a single step. These findings demonstrate the great potential of photothermal fibers in applications such as infectious disease diagnosis, food safety, and environmental monitoring.

Speaker: Xiangwei Zhao is a professor of State Key Laboratory of Digital Medical Engineering, Southeast University. He graduated from Zhejiang University with a doctoral degree in 2006. He has successively served as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University, Japan; the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, USA; the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA; and Harvard Medical School. Currently, his research focused on bio-barcode technology. The research themes include spatial omics, brain organoids, POCT, DNA information storage, biomedical big data, etc. He was PI of more than 10 projects, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant, the National Key R & D Program projects, and the Science and Technology Support Program of Jiangsu Province. He has published more than 100 SCI papers and transferred 9 invention patents. He has won the First Prize of the Natural Science Award from the Ministry of Education, the Second Prize of the Technological Invention Award of the "Huang Jiasi Biomedical Engineering Award" by the Chinese Society of Biomedical Engineering, and the Gold Medal at the Geneva International Invention Exhibition. He has been selected as an Excellent Talent in the New Century by the Ministry of Education, a Middle-aged and Young Academic Leader in the Qinglan Project of Jiangsu Province, a High-level Talent in the "Six Talent Peaks" Project of Jiangsu Province, and a "Zijin Young Scholar" and a "Huaying Scholar" at Southeast University.