Wei Pang

• Chinese Academy of Sciences

SARS‐CoV‐2 variants are under continuous emergence carry numerous mutations within S1 subunit in spike protein and have escaped neutralization through many currently used vaccines and antibodies. The development of next‐generation vaccines is a continuing and long‐term need. In our prior research, the recombinant protein vaccine HR121 targeting the...

Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs) show considerable promise for application in ultrasound imaging, but the limited bandwidth of the traditional PMUTs largely affects the imaging quality. This paper focuses on how to arrange cells with different frequencies to maximize the bandwidth and proposes a multi-frequency PMUT (MF-PM...

No-wash bioassays based on nanoparticles are used widely in biochemical procedures because of their responsive sensing and no need for washing processes. Essential for no-wash biosensing are the interactions between nanoparticles and biomolecules, but it is challenging to achieve controlled bioconjugation of molecules on nanomaterials. Reported her...

Type I interferon (IFN-I) and its downstream genes play a profound role in HIV infection. In this study, we found that an IFN-inducible gene, IFI27, was upregulated in HIV-1 infection, which in turn efficiently suppressed HIV-1 replication, specially degraded the viral gag protein, including p24 and p55 subunits. Notably, the anti-HIV-1 activity of...

Common methods to enhance PMUT arrays’ Bandwidth (BW) may compromise the sensitivity and fill factor. This study introduces a novel PMUT array with circular suspended plate structure and variable mass load atop the membranes to establish identical cell size but different resonant frequencies, and finally achieves a broad BW, improved sensitivity an...

The µTAS/LOC, a highly integrated microsystem, consolidates multiple bioanalytical functions within a single chip, enhancing efficiency and precision in bioanalysis and biomedical operations. Microfluidic centrifugation, a key component of LOC devices, enables rapid capture and enrichment of tiny objects in samples, improving sensitivity and accura...

Particles, ranging from submicron to nanometer scale, can be broadly categorized into biological and non‐biological types. Submicron‐to‐nanoscale bioparticles include various bacteria, viruses, liposomes, and exosomes. Non‐biological particles cover various inorganic, metallic, and carbon‐based particles. The effective manipulation of these submicr...

Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) cantilever resonators suffer from high motional impedance (Rm). This paper investigates the use of mechanically coupled multi-cantilever piezoelectric MEMS resonators in the resolution of this issue. A double-sided actuating design, which utilizes a resonator with a 2.5 μm thick AlN film as the passive layer, is...

The round-trip sensitivity is a key metric for ultrasonic transducers. It is well known that the bimorph transducer design can effectively improve the sensitivity of a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT). However, inevitable process variations will lead to degraded sensitivity and frequency control issues in fabricated bimorph...

This letter introduces a micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) resonant pressure gauge based on aluminum nitride piezoelectric resonators that can operate in an atmospheric environment. The pressure is measured in terms of the change in the resonant frequency of a double-ended tuning fork (DETF) resonator, where the aluminum nitride thin film serve...

It is a longstanding issue that high-order width-extensional (WE) piezoelectric microelectromechanical system (MEMS) resonators suffer low quality factors (Q-factors). In this study, it is observed that the mode distortion occurs in each unit when it couples with each other to constitute the high-order WE-mode resonator, leading to a decreased Q-fa...

Continuous and quantitative monitoring of knee joint function has clinical value in rehabilitation assessment and the timing of return to play for anterior cruciate ligament injury patients. However, the existing approaches, including clinical examination, arthrometry and inertial solutions, can only be used for qualitative, off‐line and low‐qualit...

It is a long-lasting issue that process variations, such as residual stress and poor dimension definition, deteriorate resonant frequency control of a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT). This letter presents a tapered cantilever cluster PMUT with tight frequency control. The PMUT could release residual stress via cantilever de...

Flexural mode MEMS resonators are ideal candidates for resonant microsensors. However, their high motional resistance in air restricts the performance of corresponding oscillators and consequently the sensor performance. In this work, we report a piezoelectric MEMS oscillator based on a flexural mode membrane resonator array for in-air resonant sen...

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of cantilever-type resonators with a novel stacked structure. Aluminum nitride is adopted as the material for both the structural layer and the piezoelectric layer; this simplifies the fabrication process and improves the quality factor of the resonator. Both in-plane and out-of-plan...

Virus infections remain one of the principal causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The current gold standard approach for diagnosing pathogens requires access to reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technology. However, separation and enrichment of the targets from complex and diluted samples remains a major challenge. In...

Small-sized, high-sensitivity, and low-cost sensors are required for gas-sensing applications because of their critical role in environmental monitoring, clinic diagnosis, process control, and anti-terrorism. Given the rapid developments in micro-fabrication and microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technologies, film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR)...

The pandemics induced by emerging SARS‐CoV‐2 variants and monkeypox virus infection have triggered the urgent need for broad‐spectrum vaccines. Except for “super” antigen designs, pattern recognition receptor (PRR) agonist‐based adjuvants might blaze a new trail, through enhancing the immune response of conserved antigen epitopes shared among varia...

Developing effective strategies for the flexible control of fluid is vital for microfluidic electrochemical biosensing. In this study, a gigahertz (GHz) acoustic streaming (AS) based sonoelectrochemical system was developed to realize an on-chip surface modification and sensitive hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) detection from living cells. The flexible an...

Diffusion limitations and nonspecific surface absorption are great challenges for developing micro-/nanoscale affinity biosensors. There are very limited approaches that can solve these issues at the same time. Here, an acoustic streaming approach enabled by a gigahertz (GHz) resonator is presented to promote mass transfer of analytes through the j...

Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is an emerging tick-borne infectious disease caused by the SFTS virus (SFTSV) and with a high fatality rate. Thrombocytopenia is a major clinical manifestation observed in SFTS patients, but the underlying mechanism remains largely unclear. Here, we explored the effects of SFTSV infection on platel...

This paper investigates the impact of base and anchor on the quality factor (Q) of piezoelectric microelectromechanical system (MEMS) tuning fork resonators vibrating in in-plane flexural mode, and proposes a new strategy to improve Q significantly. Finite element method simulation and measured results reveal that base and anchor geometries have a...

This paper is focused on electrode design for piezoelectric tuning fork resonators. The relationship between the performance and electrode pattern of aluminum nitride piezoelectric tuning fork resonators vibrating in the in-plane flexural mode is investigated based on a set of resonators with different electrode lengths, widths, and ratios. Experim...

Although species can arise through hybridization, compelling evidence for hybrid speciation has been reported only rarely in animals. Here, we present phylogenomic analyses on genomes from 12 macaque species and show that the fascicularis group originated from an ancient hybridization between the sinica and silenus groups ~3.45 to 3.56 million year...

HIV-1 is a highly host-specific retrovirus that infects humans but not most nonhuman primates. Thus, the lack of a suitable primate model that can be directly infected with HIV-1 hinders HIV-1/AIDS research. In the previous study, we have found that the northern pig-tailed macaques (NPMs) are susceptible to HIV-1 infection but shows a nonpathogenic...

The continuously emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants pose a great challenge to the efficacy of current drugs, this necessitates the development of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. In the previous study, we designed a recombinant protein, heptad repeat (HR) 121, as a variant-proof vaccine. Here, we found it can act as a fusion inhibitor and demonstrated bro...

Surface topography has become a powerful tool to control cell behaviors, however, it's still difficult to monitor cellular microenvironment changes during topography-induced cell responses. Here, a dual-functional platform integrating cell alignment with extracellular pH (pHe) measurement is proposed. The platform is fabricated by assembling gold n...

Tetherin prevents viral cross-species transmission by inhibiting the release of multiple enveloped viruses from infected cells. With the evolution of simian immunodeficiency virus of chimpanzees (SIVcpz), a pandemic human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) precursor, its Vpu protein can antagonize human tetherin (hTetherin). Macaca leonina (nort...

Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus (SFTSV), an emerging bunyavirus, causes severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS), with a high fatality rate of 20%–30%. At present, however, the pathogenesis of SFTSV remains largely unclear and no specific therapeutics or vaccines against its infection are currently available. Therefore,...

Stretchable electronic skin (e‐skin) paves the way for applications that exceed the scope of intrinsic rigid devices and hard‐to‐stretch sensors. The broad application range of flexible e‐skins benefits from device architectures that can simultaneously provide mechanical flexibility and superior sensitivity. Classic fractal design provides a simple...

In China, most SARS‐CoV‐2‐infected individuals had been vaccinated with inactivated vaccines. However, little is known about their immune resistances to the previous variants of concerns (VOCs) and the current Omicron sub‐lineages. Here, we collected convalescent serum samples from SARS‐CoV‐2‐infected individuals during the ancestral, Delta and Omi...

Zika Virus (ZIKV) infection is a global threat. Other than the congenital neurological disorders it causes, ZIKV infection has been reported to induce cardiac complications. However, the precise treatment plans are unclear. Thus, illustrating the pathogenic mechanism of ZIKV in the heart is critical to providing effective prevention and treatment o...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a global pandemic. Antibody resistance dampens neutralizing antibody therapy and threatens current global Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine campaigns. In addition to the emergence of resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants, little is known about how SARS-CoV-2 evades antibodies. Here, we re...

Eye blinking is closely related to human physiology and psychology. It is an effective method of communication among people and can be used in human–machine interactions. Existing blink monitoring methods include video-oculography, electro-oculograms and infrared oculography. However, these methods suffer from uncomfortable use, safety risks, limit...

At the single-cell level, cellular parameters, gene expression and cellular function are assayed on an individual but not population-average basis. Essential to observing and analyzing the heterogeneity and behavior of these cells/clusters is the ability to prepare and manipulate individuals. Here, we demonstrate a versatile microsystem, a stereo a...

The heartbeat is one of the main human physiological activities and is closely related to psychological and physiological states. Since limited solutions exist for convenient heart rate measurements at the fingertip, such as photoplethysmography, this paper provides an alternative solution enabled by a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transdu...

The emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants, commonly with many mutations in S1 subunit of spike (S) protein are weakening the efficacy of the current vaccines and antibody therapeutics. This calls for the variant-proof SARS-CoV-2 vaccines targeting the more conserved regions in S protein. Here, we designed a recombinant subunit vaccine, HR121, targeting the...

Assessment of the cough severity is essential when dealing with respiratory diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and COVID‐19. Although a few wearable devices have been reported for cough detection, they mostly rely on microphones, accelerometers, or throat‐fixed flexible sensors, which suffer from key issues including privacy dis...

Carbon nanotube (CNT)-based chemiresistors are promising gas detectors for gas chromatography (GC) due to their intrinsic nanoscale porosity and excellent electrical conductivity. However, fabrication reproducibility, long desorption time, limited sensitivity, and low dynamic range limit their usage in real applications. This paper reports a novel...

Interest is growing in the creation of wearable sweat sensors for continuous, low-cost, and noninvasive health diagnosis at the molecular level. The biofouling phenomenon leads to degradation of sweat sensors' performance over time, further limiting the successive monitoring of human health status. However, to date, the mechanism of sweat fouling i...

This letter presents a piezoelectric tuning fork resonator vibrating in in-plane flexural mode with a high quality factor (Q) and low motional impedance. A novel double-sided actuating design is implemented based on unimorph structure with a 2.5- $\mu \text{m}$ -thick AlN film as passive layer. The design significantly improves the Q and motional...

Wireless power transfer is one of the enabling technologies for powering implantable biomedical devices. Biocompatibility and CMOS compatibility of wireless power transfer devices are highly desired due to safety and footprint concerns. Toward implantable applications, this paper presents an ultrasound-induced wireless power supply based on AlN pie...

The hydrodynamic method mimics the in vivo environment of the mechanical effect on cell stimulation, which not only modulates cell physiology but also shows excellent intracellular delivery ability. Herein, a hydrodynamic intracellular delivery system based on the gigahertz acoustic streaming (AS) effect is proposed, which presents powerful targete...

Self-contained microfluidic platforms with on-chip integration of flow control units, microreactors, (bio)sensors, etc. are ideal systems for point-of-care (POC) testing. However, current approaches such as micropumps and microvalves, increase the cost and the control system, and it is rather difficult to integrate into a single chip. Herein, we de...

Sensitivity is a key parameter for microspeakers, especially in low-power applications such as consumer electronics, medical devices and Internet of Things. However, the sensitivities of most reported piezoelectric MEMS speakers are inferior to those of commercially available electrodynamic speakers. Design of high-sensitivity piezoelectric MEMS sp...

The transport, enrichment, and purification of nanoparticles are fundamental activities in the fields of biology, chemistry, material science, and medicine. Here, we demonstrate an approach for manipulating nanospecimens in which a virtual channel with a diameter that can be spontaneously self-adjusted from dozens to a few micrometers based on the...

The number of elderly people living with HIV is increasing globally, and the condition of this population is relatively complicated due to the dual effects of aging and HIV infection. However, the impact of HIV infection combined with aging on the immune homeostasis of secondary lymphoid organs remains unclear. Here, we used the simian immunodefici...

Cardiac auscultation is an orthodox method to prevent and diagnose cardiovascular diseases. Traditional stethoscopes cannot offer a highly reliable diagnosis, and electronic stethoscopes suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high cost. This paper reports an electronic stethoscope based on piezoelectric bimorph MEMS transducers for cardiac...

Contactless acoustic manipulation of micro/nanoscale particles has attracted considerable attention owing to its near independence of the physical and chemical properties of the targets, making it universally applicable to almost all biological systems. Thin-film bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators operating at gigahertz (GHz) frequencies have been...

Cell mechanical motion is a key physiological process that relies on the dynamics of actin filaments. Herein, a localized shear-force system based on gigahertz acoustic streaming (AS) is proposed, which can simultaneously realize intracellular delivery and cellular mechanical regulation. The results demonstrate that gold nanorods (AuNRs) can be del...

Currently, researches on nanomaterials have been restricted by slow and multistep synthesis procedures. Herein, we demonstrate an ultrafast, one step method of purification and delivery of quantum dots into living cells, actuated by the acoustic streaming (AS) produced through a gigahertz resonator. Results demonstrate that the impurities in the ca...

Pulmonary microbial invasion frequently occurs during AIDS progression in HIV patients. Inflammatory cytokines and other immunoregulatory factors play important roles in this process. We previously established an AIDS model of SIVmac239 infection in northern pig-tailed macaques (NPMs), which were divided into rapid progressor (RP) and slow progress...

Studies have shown that interferon (IFN)-α has an inhibitory effect on human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) replication in the acute infection stage, but its role in chronic infection is still unclear. We previously established a nonpathogenic HIV-1 and pathogenic simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) model in northern pig-tailed macaques (NPM...

The presence of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) in the environment is a serious threat to human safety, but there are many problems with the currently available detection methods for CWAs. For example, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry cannot be used for in-field detection owing to the rather large size of the equipment required, while commercial...

At the single-cell level, cellular parameters, gene expression and function are assayed on an individual but not population-average basis. Essential to observing and analyzing the heterogeneity and behavior of these cells/clusters is the ability to prepare and manipulate individual. Here, we demonstrate a versatile microsystem, a stereo acoustic st...

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) requires demanding accurate and low-power indoor localization. In this article, a high-precision 3-D ultrasonic indoor localization system with ultralow power is proposed. A new piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT) chip with a slotted membrane is designed and fabricated as a receiver,...

This article presents the development of small sized piezoelectric micromachined ultrasound transducer (PMUT) with cost effective fabrication process. Improved ultrasound imaging quality requires small sized, high frequency and high performance PMUT cell and further high density arrays. Fabrication with currently well developed and cost effective s...

Acoustofluidics has emerged as a promising method for submicron particle manipulation. However, ultrahigh‐frequency or focused sound waves are usually required to generate sufficient acoustic radiation force or localized streaming vortex for trapping nanoscale objects, which is more challenging in device fabrication. This work presents a novel meth...

As $a$ common and natural activity of human beings, eye movement has been regarded as an indicator of human physiological and psychological health; eye movement tracking has been applied to $a$ wide range of domains, such as disease diagnostics, drug therapy testing and human-computer interaction. Conventionally, eye movement is captured by thr...

Developing miniature smart electrochemical sweat sensors to perform continuous and noninvasive health diagnosis at molecule level is in the spotlight. Sensor's biofoulings hinder the targets' approaching, decreasing the detection sensitivity over time and further limiting the accurate analysis. Effective cleaning to remove biofoulings on electroche...

A microfluidic film bulk acoustic wave resonator gas sensor (mFBAR) adapted specifically as an in-line detector in gas chromatography was described. This miniaturized vapor sensor was a non-destructive detector with very low dead volume (0.02 μL). It was prepared by enclosing the resonator in a microfluidic channel on a chip with dimensions of only...

Background As the transmission routes of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) are similar, previous studies based on separate research on HIV-1 and HCV assumed a similar transmission pattern. However, few studies have focused on the possible correlation of the spatial dynamics of HIV-1 and HCV among HIV-1/HCV coin...

Although spermatogenic dysfunction is widely found in patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the underlying reasons remain unclear. Thus far, potential hypotheses involving viral reservoirs, testicular inflammation, hormone imbalance, and cachexia show inconsistent correlation with spermatogenic dysfunction. Here, northern pig-tailed mac...

This paper investigates the mechanism of a new acoustic micro-ejector using a Lamb wave transducer array, which can stably generate picoliter (pL) droplet jetting without nozzles. With eight transducers arranged as an octagon array, droplets are ejected based on the mechanism of combined acoustic pressure waves and acoustic streaming. The acoustic...

The development of rapid and efficient tools to modulate neurons is vital for the treatment of nervous system diseases. Here, a novel non-invasive neurite outgrowth modulation method based on a controllable acoustic streaming effect induced by an electromechanical gigahertz resonator microchip is reported. The results demonstrate that the gigahertz...

HIGHLIGHTS • A proposed microsystem system potentially provides accurate and calibration-free measurements based on a combination of front-end particulate matter (PM) separation and back-end PM detection. • Silicon dioxide particles are used to verify the performance of the system’s virtual impactor, and an accurate cutoff diameter of 2 μm in low a...

Cointegration and coupling a perfect metamaterial absorber (PMA) together with a film bulk acoustic wave resonator (FBAR) in a monolithic fashion is introduced for the purpose of producing ultracompact uncooled infrared sensors of high sensitivity. An optimized ultrathin multilayer stack was implemented to realize the proposed device. It is experim...

Zika virus (ZIKV) infection has caused major public health problems recently. To develop subunit vaccines for ZIKV, we have previously constructed recombinant ZIKV envelope protein domain III (EDIII), and the entire ectodomain (E80, which comprises EDI, EDII and EDIII), as vaccine candidates and showed both of them being immunogenic and protective...

Acoustic manipulation of submicron particles in a controlled manner has been challenging to date because of the increased contribution of acoustic streaming which leads to fluid mixing and homogenization. This article describes the patterning of submicron particles and the migration of their patterned locations from pressure nodes to antinodes in n...