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Virus-Detecting "Lab On a Chip" Developed At BYU
natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"
what happens when the chip identifies humanity as a virus?
I read the whole summary twice thinking this had to do with computer viruses.
They even mention words like "Medicine" and "Proteins".
Oracle> INSERT "Monkeedude1212" INTO dual
AKA the Dummy table
My wife keeps telling me that size doesn't matter... how then can viruses be identified solely by their size? It's not how big the molecules are that are important, it's what the virus can do with them!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Probably. 'Evolution' for viruses involve swapping or mutating a few base pairs. So I imagine the overall size/structure won't change much. I'd say the tricky part is not detecting a virus after it's mutated but in discerning a virus from molecules of a similar size and polarity.
How about an implant which selectively traps virus particles, incinerates them and releases their component molecules?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That way you wouldn't need to worry about vir...
Oh,
sorry.
It is amazing how technologies shown in Star Trek 45-15 years ago (esp TNG, and Voyager if I daresay) have brought to life by scientists who were inspired by its intellectual dialogue and its incredible technology. Many of the things Star Trek did...like teleporters and replicators, phasers and tricorders, and pads, we marvel at and sometimes wonder how they ever possibly could work, a seemingly impossible feat of mankind's ingenuity. And yet, over the years we have seen so many of them come to life; the Kindle and the iPAD awe me every time I see them. Consider also, MRI imaging. The ability to bring a momentarily-dead person back to life. Transplants of major organs and body parts. And now, possibly, the ability to measure the some of the most minute details of a human that we could possibly conceive. Is this another incredible step forward for mankind and his unrelenting technological, intellectual aspirations? I can't wait to see.
The chips work like coin sorters, only they are much, much smaller. Liquids flow until they hit a wall where big particles get stuck and small particles pass through a super-thin slot at the bottom. Each chip’s slot is set a little smaller than the size of the particle to be detected. After the particles get trapped against the wall, they form a line visible with a special camera.
Obviously viruses are not like coins.
Obviously their orientation as they hit the walls and slots matters.
The trick is that this thing is designed to take a single small sample, run it through, and then see where the distribution lies.
Instead of giving a bunch of samples (or several large samples) to check for a bunch of virii in a bunch of tests, this serves as a single test to identify, or at least narrow down, the virus.
Maybe this was a troll, but I'll respond anyway. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka Mormons) do believe that God created the Earth. Which is "creationism". However most LDS folks also believe in evolution (e.g. as part of God's creation) and BYU was one of the very first schools to teach evolution. Last year BYU had a big, well-publicized week-long celebration of Darwin's birthday that included many lectures on the importance of the discovery of evolution.
Does this come with a free set of the magic underwear, or does that have to be bought separately?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Looks like we have a namespace collision here.
I propose the following solution: All references to 'virus' should now point to one of the following (as appropriate).
Meatspace::virus
Bitspace::virus
That'll solve a lot of confusion (and render almost every single "Funny"-modded post in this thread irrelevant)
Thanks.
the first thing i thought when i read the article is what virus various common powdery substances would match with. flour, sugar, cinnamon, pepper, powdered dry wall, chalk dust, cokeane, nutmeg, etc.
based on this neat interactive flash demonstration comparing the sizes of coffee beans, bacterium, viruses and atoms: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/
Maybe this was a troll, but I'll respond anyway. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka Mormons) do believe that God created the Earth. Which is "creationism". However most LDS folks also believe in evolution (e.g. as part of God's creation) and BYU was one of the very first schools to teach evolution. Last year BYU had a big, well-publicized week-long celebration of Darwin's birthday that included many lectures on the importance of the discovery of evolution.
That's not "Creationism" in the normal sense. Lots of Christians (non-fundamentalists) believe that God had some sort of hand in creating the earth, but they also believe in evolution as the specific mechanism for the changes in lifeforms that we have fossil evidence for in the past few hundred million years. Note also that Darwin's theory of evolution has no position at all on the actual creation of life (from non-life). It only theorizes that organisms mutate and adapt to their environment. It doesn't say where all the organisms came from in the first place, and that's the biggest problem every time the fundies complain about it; they can't seem to understand that the two are separate issues.
A true "Creationist" believes that God created the Earth with all the organisms that now inhabit it (plus a few now-extinct ones), and that's that; no organism ever evolved into a different species, reptiles didn't evolve from fish, birds didn't evolve from T-rex's ancestors, humans don't share a common ancestor with gorillas and chimps, etc.
So no, I don't think it's correct to call LDS people "creationists" by any means, because that lumps them in with all the 6000-year-old-Earth fundie Christians. To be fair, LDS have their own wacky beliefs (that God/Jehovah is but one god of many, and lives on the planet Kolob, that Jesus appeared to Meso-Americans after leaving Israel and that various things happened tere which are completely contradicted by all archaeological evidence, etc.), but let's not criticize them for things they don't actually believe in. At least they have the good sense to acknowledge that the Earth really is billions of years old as far as we can determine by physical evidence, and that evolution is a real thing by all available evidence (and they don't try to make up some "microevolution vs macroevolution" BS like that Creationist apologists).
It's even more fascinating how the simplest things are the things that work, and how underdeveloped medicine is in so many ways. What they have invented is a sieve. Okay this is hard to do at small scales, so kudos to the researchers, but the concept is simple!
oh dear... Mormons are Intelligent Design believers, not Creationists specifically, there is a difference.
(Full disclosure, I'm an Agnostic, I don't believe in ID or Creationism, but was raised Mormon)
So no, I don't think it's correct to call LDS people "creationists" by any means, because that lumps them in with all the 6000-year-old-Earth fundie Christians...
I think the distinction you're looking for is Young Earth Creationism. There's also Old Earth Creationists, who may or may not believe in theistic evolution.
To be fair, LDS have their own wacky beliefs (that God/Jehovah is but one god of many, and lives on the planet Kolob,
*shrug* Once you believe in a supernatural, one set of beliefs isn't particularly more wacky than the next, just more or less familiar.
but let's not criticize them for things they don't actually believe in. At least they have the good sense to acknowledge that the Earth really is billions of years old as far as we can determine by physical evidence, and that evolution is a real thing by all available evidence (and they don't try to make up some "microevolution vs macroevolution" BS like that Creationist apologists).
The GP is correct that many Mormons and in particular those who pursue academic/scientific studies tend to believe in a kind of theistic evolution, but it's not accurate to say this is true of the whole. Mormon opinions run the span of the spectrum I described above. As far as I can tell there's never been an official position on the matter, but there have been authority figures who read Genesis and other creation-related canon literally, so you see Mormons arguing with each other on the topic fairly regularly if you know enough well enough. :)
Tweet, tweet.
DNA microarrays (also know as DNA chips) can already identify every virus ever discovered, and it can even identify undiscovered viruses by recognizing genetic sequences that are highly conserved among viruses. This type of chip first proved its worth in 2003 when it was used to identify SARS. The New York Times interviewed the inventor Joseph DeRisi about it:
It is not yet evident what, if any, advantage this other chip that hopes to identify viruses by their size will have.
Mormons are Intelligent Design believers
No, they certainly are not. Perhaps you should have paid a little more attention in sunday school.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Interesting way to go about things. There are other ways:
http://combimatrix.com/products_fludetector.htm
Ok, so I read the article--unsurprisingly it was light on the details. The sieve idea is good, but a few questions come to mind,
1) How are you going to do the actual virus identification? Most of the current techniques require an amplification step because you need enough signal to measure. It is great to be able to isolate small amounts, but not if you can't do anything with it. Morphological identification is one way to go, but you can only get species information that way (sometimes). You can't get strain information (ie: you know you have a flu virus, but which one?).
2) On the same line as 1), if you are going to amplify it to do some kind of test, how are you going to do that? Some viruses replicate easily (ie: in bacteria). Others don't. Almost all viruses are fairly fragile, so will they still be viable after being gathered on the chip?
3) How are you going to use this for diagnostic purposes. You can't just squirt blood onto this thing. You would need to prepare the sample in some way (to precipitate proteins, organelles, and structure polysaccharides) or else you will gunk up the chip and have a large background signal.
An interesting technology for sure, but this sort of stuff needs to be thought through if it is going to be useful in any kind of clinical way.
Microarrays are expensive. The technology requires quite a few steps, so affymetrix chips are amazingly cheap all things considered.
This technology is a glass sieve.. modern technology can do this cheaply at scale.
The awesome factor is that a raman spectrometer could probably be used to nail down some of the ambiguities for similar sized proteins. As a thin glass layer will be transparent, and the samples are in predefined locations. Since youve got to optically scan the sample anyway, why not get a raman read in the process.
And the data analysis is much more straightforward.. with a genechip, you look for a specific pattern, which may be weird if you have viruses in a sample. Where size sorting gets single on-off data points which indicate a virus of size-x which will correspond to one (possibly more) viruses.. it narrows the search pretty fast if you have yes-no answers. Plus you can do a targeted microarray when you have a narrow search field. But most of the time - sorting cold from flu from ebola and hiv is enough.
I kinda suspect that this might be pretty quick to run, as the virus only needs to move a minute (.005-.5mm-ish id supose) amount, and an ultracentrifuge can make short work of sorting much larger samples that need to separate proteins by a few millimeters. But hey, what do I know?
Storm
Ah, this brings back fond memories of physics lab experiments long ago.
The reactor was located directly south of the Heber J. Grant (HGB) building about half way down the hill. You could reach it by going down the bike path or going down the stairs toward the botany pond and taking the foot path to the west. I think the building was once the heating plant for the HGB. A look at the satellite imagery on google maps shows the building is still there, tucked away in the trees right next to the bike path. Also, Google for "byu nuclear reactor" and you'll find a couple of references including a photo of the scientists monitoring the installation in 1967.
And i thought MD5 had collision problems!
After reading TFA, it is quite clear that there is nothing new or revolutionary in this work. There are a large number of other methods for concentrating particles in microfluidic flow based on size, and there is nothing specific about this technique that somehow makes it better than other methods. To top it all off, they don't actually do any virus detection at low levels. Just FUD like "it could accumulate many particles over time that otherwise might be missed by other tests" without any data actually showing that this technique enables ultra-sensitive virus detections. As someone who has published in Lab on a Chip, I have read a great many papers in that publication and pretty much 95% of all the papers will read just the same. I guess these guys got their press office to do a good job at 'spinning' the story.
So move along. And one more thing to note, if this was really as revolutionary as it is claimed to be, it would have been published in Science, Nature or PNAS. Lab on Chip is not the premier journal for chip based research, it just gets a lot of the hand me downs that were never good enough to make it to the really big name, high-impact journals.
http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html
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I'm not sure how you define ID, but the whole 'evolution is the observable effect God's master plan' sounds like ID to me.
Any biblical religion believes what the bible said, scooping Darwin by at least 5,000 years: "[Animals] were made fruitful and able to multiply -- in the sea and on the earth -- each after its own kind."
ID is not an excuse to teach creationism, as thought up by clever bible-thumpers. It is merely a heresy, crafted by perverting religion to meet a perverted science. It should be treated as such, and not used as a reason to hate anything but ID. Mormonism, as a religion, rejects ID. You might find a few idiots who attempt to coalesce the pseudoscience of ID with mormonism, but that is a personal religious compromise, which runs contrary to the teachings of their church.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.