9.21.12-Base Pair Biotechnologies Founder & Chief Scientist, Dr. Bill Jackson will direct a new 1 year SBIR grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) entitled, “Portable nanofluidic aptamer-SERS instrument for measurement of chemical exposure“. Under the contract, which is formally placed with Base Pair’s parent company, BioTex, Inc., novel aptamers will be selected to small molecules such as PCBs, phthalates, and bisphenol-A which are generally regarded as hazardous to humans. In collaboration with Drs. Jun Kameoka and Gerald Cote’ of Texas A&M University, the aptamers will then be incorporated in a novel, nanofluidic, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) platform for ultrasensitive detection of the compounds in blood. The hope is that with such a system, scientists and clinicians will be able to correlate the amount of such compounds *in the blood* (rather than in the environment) with various disease states.