Frog Cells Turned Drug Detectors

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Saw on Webdrift that New Scientist has an article on color-changing frog cells and that they could be used to drug test athletes. Apparently the cells are particularly good at detecting opiate drugs, and you don't even have to know which one you're testing for!"

Comments

poppy seeds

[evenprime]

I don't like the idea of testing people for opiates without knowing *which* opiates you are testing for. Prescription medication or poppy seed bagels could be a major problem if this becomes a widely used testing method.

Hopefully they will only use this as a primary test, and use more discriminating tests to distinguish *which* opiates are present in people who test positive

Strange Emphasis

[Kotetsu]

The last paragraph of the article says:

The sensor has other uses too. Since it changes colour with any chemical that acts like an opiate, it could be used to screen chemical compounds for useful opiate drugs, says Bayley.

I would have thought that this was more valuable to society - the ability to rapidly screen thousands of compounds for potential activity of a specific type. The process sounds like it may lend itself to similar screening of compounds of other types which bind to cell membrane receptors. But these researchers apparent first thought was about how they could use it to identify evil drug abusers, including people abusing something never before seen which has the same effects. Maybe there's more money in helping find drug abusers.