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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.'"
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.
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.
Probably none.
Normal animal cell size: 10-30 micrometers
Normal plant cell size: 10-100 micrometers
Normal virus size: 10-300 nanometers
Not to mention the gap in the detector is smaller than plant and animal cells entirely:
They formed the third dimension by placing a 50 nanometer-thin layer of metal onto the chip, then topping that with glass deposited by gasses. Finally they used an acid to wash away the thin metal, leaving the narrow gap in the glass as a virus trap.
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.
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