The silver used by Beth Gwinn's research group at UC Santa Barbara has value far beyond its worth as a commodity, even though it's used in very small amounts.  

The group works with the precious metal to create nanoscale silver clusters with unique fluorescent properties. The clusters' fluorescent properties are important for a variety of biomedical sensing applications including biological imaging.  

The team's latest research is published in a featured article in this month's issue of ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The scientists positioned silver clusters at programmed sites on a nanoscale breadboard, a construction base for prototyping of photonics and electronics. "Our 'breadboard' is a DNA nanotube with spaces programmed 7 nanometers apart," said lead author Stacy Copp, a graduate student in UCSB's Department of Physics.