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DIY Biochemical Scanner From a Hacked CD Drive
holy_calamity writes "Turns out hacking two extra light sensors into a CD drive can turn it into a lab scanner to read the results of high-accuracy immunoassays used to detect disease markers or pathogens, New Scientist reports. The drive proved able to detect pesticides at concentrations as low as 0.02 micrograms per liter."
Let me guess.... MacGyver happened to haev a paper clip and a rubber band beside the computer.
bomb the us up set someone
Viruses can be transmitted via CD.
Don't trust strange CDs.
[/PSA]
...don't tell my wife the results
Sweet! An all new way to burn myself using off the shelf hardware!
I would have liked to get more information. The whole "DIY" seems a bit misleading but a fun story to read. Much thanks.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I'm sure some people have already been using CD drives with biological samples smeared across the disks.
Mental note: never rent porn dvds.
liqbase
Sadly, the drive was later mistaken as a normal CD drive and one of the researchers attempted to play the collection of Sony CD's on it. Now the drive refuses to do anything, claiming the pesticides are patented and trademarked and detecting them would be a violation of someone's Intellectual Property.
Discode was a project to do an "open source" bio hardware device that sounds very similar to this. The project was going on under the guidance of a UCSD professor and got a lot of write up about three years ago but it seemed to slowly disappear over the years.
I'd be willing to give up my last 5.25" bay if I could use it to give me the secret cheeto powder recipe.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I think he's missing the initial point here. The point is to reduce the overall cost of being capable of running the test, not in vastly increasing the efficiency of running a massive batch of tests this way. Certainly there's downstream potential for it, but by itself, this provides testing capabilities to a much wider set of labs.
The real question is, if the laboratory machines are using more or less the same technology as the CD drives, why do the actual lab machines cost so much more? From TFA, the machine this replaces costs 30-60k Euro, compared to 15 Euro for a generic CD drive.
It seems all the tests might show positive results from the disc materials, plastics, and solvents on the inside of the cdrom itself.
you can hack your DVD drive to destroy the pathogens
How much paper machete and duct tape was used in the construction?
The game.
I once hacked open a old CD drive to take a look at the laser and inner workings inside. I'm no optics expert, but what I found was that the laser portion of the device was essentially a tiny interferometer as far as I could tell (surprise surprise). Since you can use interferometry to measure such things as differences in wavelength within fractions of a nanometer - couldn't this technique be applied to biochemical applications as well?
0.02 micrograms per liter
What does this mean exactly? 0.02 micrograms per litre of what?
I saw something on Beyond Tomorrow on the Science channel several months ago where they were doing this with unmodified drives. It was all done in the software. In the example they tested to see if something was anthrax or not. I can't seem to find anything about it except for references to the show. I believe it was episode 23 if it's available anywhere.
who knew those things were as useful as tricorders? "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a crazy DIY geek!" (said lovingly toward diy geeks...)
Shop as usual. Avoid panic buying.
It will eventually be used for illicit drug testing.
But, will is spin a new yarn?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
0.02ug/L of protein is what I got from reading the article.
The array can have 300,000 spots of different proteins.
Each spot is at a fraction of a uL volume. The sample must be at 0.02ug/L to be detected.
This is a huge step over commercial applications for a variety of reasons.
First array density
For example I do nucleic acid microarrays (even though the example in the article is protein arrays). We can look at ~30000 samples per array, so the people in the article are able to assess an order of magnitude more information than the system I use, and half an order of magnitude more information than the really expensive systems (for nucleic acids).
The second is sensitivity.
Typical protein assays are done in 96 well plates in the average lab, drug discovery labs may use 3800+ well plates and get results. The advantage of these assays is that the total protein amounts will be on average much higher than in the 300,000 sub uL volume spots printed on the CD that have to be 0.02ug/L or better. So the detection apparatus is actually quite good in the case of the CD detection system.
Third is cost.
The high end nucleic acid systems which are half an order of magnitude worse for sample density cost about 250,000$ for initial equipment costs. Plus more for analysis. The cheaper system that I use ends up using the EXACT same software package they used for downstream processing. CD's are cheaper than custom glass slides.
Fourth is procedural.
A little further customization of the system to make it somewhat fluid tolerant would allow for the drive to also act as a dryer which is achieved currently on glass arrays by buying a special centrifuge. The CD player is the centrifuge.
Because laboratory machines are tools built for the job and last a comparatively long time... I've never had any qualms about paying $100-200 for a magnetic stir plate in a lab, because I know the stir plate will last the length of my professors tenure and then some. There are some stir plates in our building from the 60s and 70s. They'll stir 24/7 for literally years without stopping or overheating and it won't stop because you spill something on them. Granted a stirplate is pretty simple compared to most lab equipment, but the point is still the same.
This device sounds like a visible spectrometer. You shine light through something and see how much comes out. The concentration of the absorbing material is proportional to the negative log of the fraction of the light that passes through and is also proportional to the pathlength the light travels through the material. Pretty simple in principle...you could use a flashlight and a photodiode and you have a spec. Even daylight and your eyes would work if you had a good set of standards. But that doesn't mean the your makeshift spec will do a good job. Can it do a variety of wavelengths? Can it detect different wavelengths? What is the smallest wavelength increment it can measure? How little light can it detect? Can you change the pathlength? Can it record data to a computer easily? Can it handle large quantities of samples without user interaction? Can it hold the sample at a specific temperature or cycle the temperature?
If you want to say yes to all those questions, and want something reliable, and you don't want to spend hours and hours of labor assembling something then you pay for the proper tool for the job. If this instrument is in fact a visible spectrometer, there are tons of specs that cost MUCH less than 10000 euros/dollars, it's just they have different sets of features.
I don't think it's newsworthy to say that you didn't have to go to the hardware store to buy a screwdriver when you discovered that a butterknife could do the same job at a lower cost...
Actually, the REAL question is...
;-)
WILL IT BLEND?
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
There are 10+ year old patents on using optical drives for biological testing, assays, etc. The technology is pretty slick. With appropriate firmware, a CD drive can count the red blood cells in a sample on the surface of the disk. Just using a modified device driver statistical analysis could be done based on error rates. The CD could even load the software for using the CD to do an analysis.