Slashdot Mirror
Trapping Toxins Using Gold Nanoparticles
Billly Gates writes "British scientists have found a way to quickly and accurately find toxins by binding gold nanoparticles with sugar which then could be dissolved in a solution that changes color when any toxin is found. This procedure could be used in the medical field to find poisons and diseases as well as finding substances in bioterrorist attacks."
"First you get the sugar & gold nanoparticles, then you get the power, then you get the women".
*sighs*
Mention bioterrorism and you're guaranteed publicity and funding.
Meanwhile, the real bioterrorists are never going to be bought to justice.
My pics.
possibly too heavy to stay in suspension when coated with sugars?
Just a guess, but gold is pretty dense stuff.
-Matt
Why can't this invention be deemed notable for its own worth? News outlets continually drag some kind of terrorism into everything these days...
Suddenly, a new way to detect toxins isn't notable because it helps those with medical conditions, but rather because it hinders terrorists from achieving their goals... not that it isn't a good side effect or anything.
What's next? "New construction techniques defend against terrorist bombings"?
I know its a little much to expect an ac to read the article, but right in there:So - you're going to need a special 'receptor' sugar for each toxin type.
My pics.
I do have to say, your soapbox points have a bit of merit, if slighly off topic.
What you have to understand is that, unlike you and your kin, the world's science community cannot focus on a single issue. We have hundreds of great minds and thousands of average ones studying many different problems at any given time. While some see fit to study ways to make GE'd crops sterile, others study ways to make similar GE'd crops yield 2x as much. You cannot say that either side is bad, both are looking out for their best intrests and may have consequences outside of their realm of influence. Such is the way of the world today.
We cannot stand still and expect the old ways of business to take care of tomorrows problems. The population of the world is growing. 6.5 billion today, 7 billion in a few years... 8 isn't too far away. You cannot claim that technology like this is bad if you can't see the big picture.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
But then, I know very little about all this, there's way too little info in TFA to tell about these things at the moment.
I'm not sure if what I'm saying is painfully obvious already. If I get a (Score:-1, Redundant), then I'll just have to live with it.
500 years after alchemy became chemisty, and we can only turn gold into lead???
Apparently gold has been used to detect other things, too. It's a different procedure, but interesting none the less.
The article is purposely vague because it's a fluff piece. Maybe the PR department for the University of East Anglia had some credits to burn with the BBC. The technology amounts to little more than,"We found a new way to grind gold to a finer particle size and now we can use it to... uh... do some stuff which... can... uh... be used for... um... detecting TERRORISTS!" Throw in the sappy bit about water testing with the gratuitous shot of the poverty stricken child crouching in a dirty alleyway and everything's all set.
Take for example this phrase,"the target substance, be it a poison such as ricin or a bug like E.coli, binds to the sugar." That must be some sort of that funny magical sugar that comes from the end of the rainbow if it can bind both ricin (a protein of about 520 amino acid residues) and E.coli (an entire bacteria) with any selectivity over, say, phlegm or an innocent algae.
The article is a cheap promotion for Professor David Russel and a PR feelgood article for those who don't know much about biochemistry.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
It changes color for "any toxin"? What exactly is a "toxin". As any toxicologist will tell you, poison is all about the dosage.
At 1000mg / dose, Tylenol is an effective, safe non-addictive pain releiver.
At 7000mg / dose, it causes irreversible liver damage in most adults without the antidote.
Poisoning by Iron supplements used to be a very common cause of poison deaths among children until there were mandated safety caps for iron supplements.
So again, what is a "toxin"?
SirWired
How the hell do you make a discovery like this???
Someone was walking around the office one day with a cup of sugar and tripped and spilled it into the vat of gold nanoparticles???
A spoon full of sugar (/w gold nanoparticles) helps the ricin go down? the ricin go down.. the ricin go down??
(Shameless theft of riff from and apologies to Mary Poppins)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
This is eerily similar to what the horn of the unicorn is supposed to do in the presence of poisons.
...
Life imitates art and art imitates life, but which is it this time
16 nm gold colloid will stay suspended at room temperature even when coated with fairly large biomolecules (around to 100-200 kDa). It's only in the 30-50 nm range for gold that brownian motion at room temp is no longer enough to keep the particles in solution. This work is basically a version of work done by Chad Mirkin's group at Northwestern 8 years ago. They've changed the scheme by which they link the gold nanoparticles, but the optical signal they're observing has been understood and characterized for years.
...possibly too heavy to stay in suspension when coated with sugars?
Yup. Micron sized gold particles will settle out.
Additionally, the readout is with visible light--a change in color from red to blue. Micron sized particles, even if shaken to form a relatively uniform suspension, will scatter visible light and interfere with your detection (the solution will look cloudy). 16 nm particles will form a clear solution that will allow you to accurately measure the color by absorbance without interference from scattering.
Shouldn't you be doing something useful?
Disclaimer: I did not read the article However, they must have had some sort of theory to start with which made them even think of binding gold nanoparticles to sugar. Sometimes it's a lot easier to observe what happens in reality, and then piece together the steps that led up to the observed effect. You make it sound as if the scientists aren't planning on learning from what they've seen.
It's "Gold Particle" not "Gold NANOparticle". I'm sick of random addition of "nano" in front of words to make them sound new.
A dupe with THIS article?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Actually, it's a pretty straightforward result. They took old work by Chad Mirkin and Coworkers (http://www.chem.northwestern.edu/~mkngrp/Group%20 Research.htm/), and the use of sugars to solubilize gold for therapeutic uses http://images.google.com/images?q=auranofin&hl=en& btnG=Search+Images/, then changed the receptors. Straightforward applied engineering from known principles and substances. It's only novel if you're a science journalist with space to fill who doesn't follow the chemical literature.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Apparently scientist have found a new way to spread the wealth.
This story is quite ironic... if you are a Cyberman.
But do they know why it happened? is there an undelying theory that can be applied to other materials? do we know why it works with gold? does it work with other substances? and if it does not, why?
"So, I would guess that when you put the gold nanoparticles in the presence of another chemical that the new chemical starts to interact with the gold and changes the either the actual size of the particle or the "effective" size of the particle (meaning the size of the particle-capping agent complex). Either way, it would lead to a change such as the one described in the article."
Actually, it is more likely that the binding of the toxin perturbs the surface plasmon of the nanoparticle (as it is the surface plasmon that gives rise to color). Upon binding the plasmon is changed slightly, so that it resonates at a different frequency and hence, the color of the solution changes.
Just by intuition speaking here.
Which legends are you reading. I though unicorn horns were supposed to be a cure for toxins, not a detector.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
the toxin could also cause the particles to form extended networks, which resonate at different frequencies due to plasmonic coupling.
Why, a "toxin" is any vague, mysterious, ill-defined "bad thing" that whatever magic water, magnets, or pseudo-religious ritual-for-hire that the peddler is selling is supposed to make go away, of course.
Seriously, I think "toxin", "detoxify", and other variations of the word used outside of an actual poison-studying-scientist publication is pretty much an automatic sign that the writer/speaker/salesdrone is blowing smoke.
(In fairness, TFA actually IS about poison-studying-scientists though...)
The gold nanoparticles are just there as a non-reactive substance to stick any one of a variety of tailored sugar molecules which is known to react with a particular substance. The article doesn't look like it specifically says, but I assume what happens is that when the sugar reacts in the presence of whatever-bad-thing-you-want-to-detect, it dissolves off of the tiny gold particles, which then precipitate out of the solution so you can see them.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
If this really worked, I wouldn't get a hangover after downing a bottle of Goldschlager, now would I???
That's what we have here. It's not ordinary sugar, it's a selected type of monosaccharide for each kind of target to be detected.
And what they don't say is that it's probable that there are many "toxins" for which no such marker exists. And that it's probable for one marker to react to more than one dissolved substance, possibly leading to false positives.
It's a cute trick, though, making the gold stay with the sugar in a solution. It'd be interesting to see how often it dissolves off before detecting anything, or how long it takes for it to dissolve off afterward.
Isn't this a selling point for Goldschlager? :)
Well, to be fair, the University of East Anglia isn't exactly a prestigous university, in fact, it's one of the worst in the country, so they'd need to do whatever they can to get people to take them seriously. That being said, it'd be interesting to see how this turns out - the symptoms of poisoning are often quite vague, but there are a lot of toxins, and presumably these indicators are specific to certain toxins - will the fact that you'd have to do about half a million tests to ensure that someone HASN'T been poisoned (and gold ain't cheap) or the fact that this provides a definitive way of proving that someone has been poisoned ... you know, before they're dead, win out?