MicrofluidicChip
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Jellyfish-mimicking device could snatch cancer cells right out of the bloodstream
If you think the picture above looks like droplets of blood being snared in a sticky tentacle, then you have a scarily active -- but in this case accurate -- imagination. It's actually a microfluidic chip that's been coated with long strands of DNA, which dangle down into the bloodstream and bind to any cancerous proteins floating past -- directly imitating the way a jellyfish scoops up grub in the ocean. If required, the chip can release these cells unharmed for later inspection. According to the chip's designers at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, the catch-and-release mechanism can be put to both diagnostic and therapeutic use in the fight against Big C, and can also be used to isolate good things, like fetal cells. The next step will be to test the device on humans -- at which point we may owe an even greater debt of gratitude to our gelatinous friends. [Image credit: Rohit Karnik and Suman Bose]
Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video)
Early research has had DNA making circuits and little factories. We haven't really seen DNA used as a storage medium, however, and it's evident we've been missing out. A Harvard team led by George Church, Sriram Kosuri and Yuan Gao can stuff 96 bits into a DNA strand by treating each base (A, C, G, T) as though it's a binary value. The genetic sequence is then synthesized by a microfluidic chip that matches up that sequence with its position in a relevant data set, even when all the DNA strands are out of order. The technique doesn't sound like much on its own, but the microscopic size amounts to a gigantic amount of information at a scale we can see: about 704TB of data fits into a cubic millimeter, or more than you'd get out of a few hundred hard drives. Caveats? The processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than just transfers. All the same, such density and a lifespan of eons could have us turning to DNA storage not just for personal backups, but for backing up humanity's collective knowledge. We're less ambitious -- we'd most like to know if we'll be buying organic hard drives alongside the fair trade coffee and locally-sourced fruit.
Portable device can sniff out anthrax in an hour, won't bring the noise
Got some mysterious white powder sitting on your coffee table? A new, suitcase-sized device can tell you whether you've got dandruff, or anthrax. Developed by researchers at Cornell and the University of Albany, the detector uses a microfluidic chip (pictured on the left) to collect and purify the DNA on a given sample, before conducting a series of polymerase chain reactions -- processes that can quickly identify biological materials. The machine, which has been in the works for seven years, is powerful enough to deliver test results in just one hour (requiring a sample of only 40 microscopic spores), but is slim enough to fit in an airline's overhead luggage bin. Scientists say their creation could also be catered to pick up on other pathogens, including salmonella, and may even pay dividends for crime scene investigators handling forensic evidence. No word yet on when the device could hit the market, but we won't touch an ounce of sugar until it does.
Microfluidic chip does 1,000 parallel chemical reactions, looks glorious
We'd never considered a career in biochemistry until we saw this wild beast of a chemical microprocessor. Microfluidic chips, used to test chemical reactions and properties, have been known to be smaller, but they've never before been quite this powerful. The result of a joint study between California State University, UCLA and China's Wuhan University, the "integrated microfluidic device" is capable of performing 1,024 in situ chemical reactions at a time, making the researcher's life, oh, about 1,024 times easier. Most importantly though, costly enzymes previously used for a single test can now be split up into hundreds and tested simultaneously, which should pave the way for exponentially faster and easier medical research. It's not clear when these will be widely available, but we're sure PhDs around the world are trying to order one as we speak.[Via medGadget]
Researchers in the Netherlands develop a microfluidic chip for testing drug reactions
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have developed an extremely small microfluidic chip that simulates chemical reactions commonplace in the human body, for testing drug reactions. The device is around a thousand times smaller than the usual electrochemical cell (the volume of the chip's main fluid channel is a mere 9.6 nanoliters) and uses electrodes to control the chemical reactions. It's already been used to conduct tests on Amodiaquine, an anti-malarial drug, with more studies sure to follow. While this is great news for medical science, we have to wonder what the small army of slackers, malingerers, and college students are going to do when they're no longer able to make money as human guinea pigs. Become bloggers?[Via PhysOrg]
