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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will initiate the development of an entirely new class of biochips, with a particular focus on biochips designed to track the expression, activation and post-translational modification of proteins involved in cell signaling processes. These biochips will be widely applicable to the field of proteomics. The technology is based on the use of liquid crystals to image biomolecular interactions at structured surfaces. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that substrates for liquid crystal-based biochips can be prepared from mechanically rubbed films of protein that are covalently attached to glass substrates. The important issues of non-specific adsorption, binding of specific target proteins and stability of rubbed protein films will be addressed. This approach to fabrication of biochips aims to leverage the manufacturing knowledge generated over past decades for liquid crystal display technology and thereby provide low cost biochips with potential for broad impact.This class of biochip has the potential to be extremely rapid (minutes), to be highly sensitive (magnitudes more sensitive than gels and ELISA), to be inexpensive (less than $0.20/determination) and when combined with microfluidics, to make possible the imaging of large numbers of proteins simultaneously . The commercial applications of the technology and the products to be developed in this project will be in well defined markets, ranging from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to general scientific research laboratories that are conducting research in cellular signalling pathways