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Briefcase Sized DNA Analysis System
An anonymous reader writes "Japan's NEC Corporation along with Aida Engineering have developed a briefcase-sized DNA analysis system that enables the police to perform comprehensive DNA testing at crime scenes in as little as 25 minutes. The same test would take at least a day to a week (if re-testing or conformation is required) in the lab. The system is compact enough to be carried to crime scenes or other locations where quick DNA analysis is required, making it the world's first portable DNA analysis system."
Can't wait to see the minimum-wage TSA employees using this.
Coming soon! To an airport near you!!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I cannot imagine my rights being violated by some brash badge or overzealous detective. Never. I imagine all of the data collected will be kept private and secure. I cannot imagine my dna ever falling into the wrong hands. I cannot fathom an hmo denying to insure me due to my genes. No another tool which has added another layer of security and safety to the average true blooded american citizen. And for those nasty criminals (ahem *citizens*) we can use those new fangled pain guns to get them to give samples so we arrest them for all the horrible things they (ahem ahem *may* (g0d I have a sore throat today)) have done.
I love to see the principles of the constitution being upheld(ahem ahem ahem *read as trampling* (must be pneumonia(bad genes I guess))).
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I guess it won't be long now until we see a sampler/scanner that fits into a turnstile.
From the blurb:
The same test would take at least a day to a week (if re-testing or conformation is required) in the lab.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong here, but the 1-7 days is still gonna be the case if/when you're verifying your results. This is just a "quick and dirty" test that will gain more acceptance and weight that it will deserve (::cough::POLYGRAPH::cough::). My guess is that it will just be a tool that Homeland Security/Your Average Cop will use to hold you until other tests *conclusively* provide a definite presence/absence answer (like PCR done by an ISO certified lab, HPLC done by an ISO certified lab, GCMS done by.. well you get the point.)
Just my $0.02 here.
E = m * c^(Hammer)
I don't suppose you considered the possibility that this device was engineered and built by PHD's who have worked in the field longer than you knew it existed, and quite possibly are doing things you didn't even know were possible because they are the result of private, unpublished, research.
I am not saying that your wrong, only that your making an assumption that is, quite possibly, false. I'd imagine that they would not announce that something like this is available if it more or less completely failed to yield usable results.
I also suspect that it's not really designed for an untrained or inexperienced user... I'd imagine it's more useful for quick, on site, elimination of suspects performed by a field technician specially trained in DNA sample collection and analysis. Very useful if your one of the potential suspects who says... "I didn't do it, test me and send me home!".
Finally, I suspect that it's absolutely worthless in obtaining high 'resolution', and highly reliable results... however I would imagine it's great for determining if a suspect matches the sample found at a crimescene with a fair margin of error. Or, for example, to determine if the sample found is even human. I can see a lot of uses for a device that gives "close enough" results, as long as any positive results are verified through more precise methods.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Now, I've been away from molecular bio for a few years, so I was curious to know if this sort of speed was even remotely possible. I mean, I remember this whole process requiring a pretty solid afternoon's worth of work at minimum- and depending on the circumstances, often involved setting stuff up to run overnight. Having Googled "fastest PCR" and having found this paper, I have to admit NEC might not be full of crap about this.
Basically, they find workarounds for all the time-intensive steps in the analysis. DNA extraction? They add proteinase K and guanidine to whole blood, then put it through a solid-phase extraction that they say takes only 6 minutes.
For PCR, there's really only so far you can go to speed things up due to limits imposed by reaction kinetics, but the tiny sample size allows them to run through each temperature station in a couple seconds (it should be noted that the fragments they're replicating are only about 200 base pairs).
The separation by electrophoresis is where the magic really happens. See, the parent and I were thinking about how this is usually done, by moving a band of DNA across a slab of polyacrylamide or agarose gel. The setup is labor-intensive, and as the parent notes, it does take awhile for the gel to run to completion They instead do high voltage capillary electrophoresis- and their capillaries are channels etched into a glass chip. Fluorescent intercalating dye was present in the sieving matrix, and detection was done with laser-induced fluorescence- no Southern blot. Everything runs on a single chip, and in 25 minutes goes from bodily fluids to genetic fingerprinting.
I know there's been a lot of hype about "lab-on-a-chip" systems and what the future holds. What's mentioned in this Dec. 2006 paper is of course a research proof-of-concept system- if you look at their PCR setup, their "thermal control system" is a heat lamp and cooling fan controlled by a laptop. A year later, is NEC about to debut a 25 minute DNA lab-on-a-chip as a commercial product? I don't know, but I no longer think the idea is as crazy as it sounds.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Indeed, I had a lecture from the director of our national forensic institute (Dutch) once, explaining the whole procedure of obtaining DNA, what they actually analyze and how they verify the validity. There is a reason why these tests take up to 2 weeks to give a result: Once you as a scientist say "we have DNA evidence, we got him!" it pretty much seals the deal. So you got to be damn sure you are right: -what are the odds that an identical DNA pattern from someone else came there (no they don't sequence your DNA, so there's a small chance that another person with a similar pattern was on the crime scene, usually the chance is close to zero though) -how was the evidence collected, could it be contaminated etc. etc. -is there other evidence that contradicts the results And after that an analyzis has to been done estimating the chances that you are wrong in saying that the DNA is from the person you are accusing, and that he/she actually commited the crime. I wouldn't be very happy to let an untrained (in forensics) police officer do those things, because most of them hardly known what DNA is, and what exactly is analyzed. Another reason why you wouldn't wnat that: in the lab everythinh is done anonymous, the analyst just has sample numbers and suspect, X, Y, and Z. The police will know the name of the suspect and stop looking as soon as they think they can nail him, regardless of the presence of any other evidence contradicting this. PS. This forensics guy wasn't too happy with CSI, it creates really unrealistic expectations about what cases the police can actually solve (and the amount of time it takes them to do so).