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Device Can Extract DNA With Full Genetic Data In Minutes
vinces99 writes "Imagine taking a swab of saliva from your mouth and, within minutes, having your DNA ready for genome sequencing. A new device from University of Washington engineers and a company called NanoFacture can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods. It will give hospitals and labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations."
GATTACA here we come!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
...you gotta sequence a lot of DNA RIGHT NOW! In all seriousness though, this is pretty neat. Not every step in technology has to be earth shattering.
I can see this drastically reducing the cost of getting your DNA sequenced, and at the same time I can see police starting to take it anytime they would take fingerprints.
http://interserver.net/
This would be the ultimate goal in Identity Verification... And then we find ourselves being cloned...
Some people are missing the point here, so for emphasis: this product only prepares DNA for sequencing, it doesn't do the sequencing itself. Half an hour of preparation is reduced to minutes, but the actual work still takes days.
This will be serious competition for these guys
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You can also do it in minutes with common household items: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/labs/extraction/howto/
Extraction's not the problem. Sequencing is not actually a problem, either (~$150k gets you an ION Torrent Proton that will come close to sequencing a person in a few hours). Data analysis is currently the hardest and costliest part of sequencing. Of course, that's getting better, too.
Don't get me wrong, incremental process improvements such as this are important, they're just not groundbreaking anymore.
-Chris
No, no, no, absolutely not. Paternity testing without the mother's consent is rightly illegal in most of the world's civilized countries.
I had never heard that. I followed the link to find out more, it the info there says it's banned in France, but legal in the U.S., U.K, and Germany. A small sample of "civilized countries," but still, 1 out of 4 doesn't sound like "most" have banned it.
Biological father means nothing. Fatherhood is determined by sociology, not biology. Keep repeating this until it gets into your tiny brain. Who the hell cares that a child's socially acknowledged father is not biological? Nobody that matters!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
More FUDDY FUDDY FUD for the stock pumping, what else is new? Instant DNA sequencing is like "quantum computing", which keeps getting "invented" over and over and over again. What a joke. Queue the scam defenders in 3...2...1.... (gotta keep up the hoax, or else they have to find REAL work!)
Its not bullshit, you just can't read.
Its fast DNA separation, not fast DNA sequencing. You need to get good samples of just the DNA to do sequencing, and that's what they're claiming they can do.
The only thing that might help "instantly" is the chip-based gene tests, not full sequencing (of which the DNA extraction isn't a particularly time consuming part.)
You get sequencing too...
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/dnatransistor/
W engineers designed microscopic probes that dip into a fluid sample – saliva, sputum or blood – and apply an electric field within the liquid. That draws particles to concentrate around the surface of the tiny probe. Larger particles hit the tip and swerve away, but DNA-sized molecules stick to the probe and are trapped on the surface.
I read through the entire article link, and didn't learn a whole lot about how it actually performs. The above paragraph was the only technical information included. From what I can see, neither really tests performance against really challenging samples with a lot of crud or difficult-to-extract material. We only have the PR blurb's claim that it's better than a typical Miniprep column.
Found a couple of papers that might be more relevant:
Size-Specific Concentration of DNA to a Nanostructured Tip Using Dielectrophoresis and Capillary Action (Has downloadable PDF)
Nanotips for single-step preparation of DNA for qPCR analysis (Paywall)
Ok, from the first paper, we find out what this is really for:
Extracellular DNA is of great interest in the fields of disease diagnostics and environmental molecular biology. Unlike the genomic DNA in normal cells, extracellular DNA is the free DNA released from dead cells. Thus, extracellular DNA circulating in body fluids can be used as an early indicator for various acute diseases such as cancer. For example, the concentration of extracellular DNA for a normal person is 30ng/mL, but the concentration is increased to 300 ng/mL for a cancer patient. When the issue comes to environmental monitoring, extracellular DNA dissolved in lakes and soil is an indicator for environmental quality because the dissolved DNA is generated from cell lysis and excretion. In spite of such a great potential, the study of extracellular DNA is limited by the standard sample preparation methods.
The conventional methods begin with filtering, centrifuging, and collecting DNA from a raw sample. In aggressive experimental protocols, genomic DNA from normal cells is released and mixed with extracellular DNA. In addition, a few hours is required for the sample preparation process, which can degrade and mutate extracellular DNA.6 As a result, the original information of extracellular DNA is partially or completely lost. Therefore, a rapid process that can concentrate extracellular DNA is very important for identifying pathogenic information. This paper presents a size-specific concentration mechanism directly extracting extracellular DNA from a sample mixture using a nanostructured tip. The concentration process is performed with two sequences: (1) an alternating current (AC) electric field is applied to attract DNA and other bioparticles in the vicinity of a nanotip; (2) only the DNA is size-selectively captured onto the nanotip by the combination of dielectrophoresis and capillary action. In the analytical section, the forces involved in the concentration are estimated to investigate the capturing process. An analytical model is presented for capillary induced size-selectivity that is described as the function of the ratio of a particle to a tip diameter.
Basically, this is a special purpose method for concentrating extra-cellular DNA while leaving whole cell material intact. It's not meant to compete against a Miniprep, but analyze a whole different type of sample material; you are trying to fish out what genetic material is already floating around outside of your cells. Really a niche kind of research thing, I don't know if this will make a whole lot of impact, either practically, academically, or economically.
It contributes to the preservation of peace within families. All paternity testing does is cause disputes. A biological father has nothing to do with a real father. He's just a sperm donor, nothing more. Fatherhood is determined by society, not DNA.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
All paternity testing does is cause disputes.
No, what causes disputes is a woman who sleeps with so many men that she cannot identify the father, or who sleeps with someone else and tries to trick a man into marrying her to take care of the child that the real father won't. Paternity tests only uncover the original unethical acts, it is not an unethical act in and of itself. It is those unethical acts that cause the disputes.
A biological father has nothing to do with a real father.
A biological father is a real father. It has nothing to do with "father figure" or "parenting", however.
Fatherhood is determined by society, not DNA.
You keep saying this, but that doesn't make it true. Biological fatherhood is determined by DNA. Parental rights are determined by society.
Paternity testing allows determination of true family medical history and genetic lineages for susceptibility to certain diseases. Paternity testing allows legal determinations of fatherhood for purposes of inheritance and child support. Paternity testing allows determination of common ancestry involved in marriage prohibitions (e.g., brother/sister).
Some people are missing the point here, so for emphasis: this product only prepares DNA for sequencing, it doesn't do the sequencing itself. Half an hour of preparation is reduced to minutes, but the actual work still takes days.
It used to take days, and still does if funding is short but an Illumina HiSeq 2500 can produce 150-180 Gbases in 40 hours in rapid run mode [1]. Most labs still run it in high output mode because of the reagent cost but the option is there. This means that if I was prepared to pay the extra and I sent a sample into "core sequencing" where I work, they could potentially return mapped DNA in a week. After that there's still some improvement tools we'd need to run to clean up artefacts, followed by calling and filtering variants, those bits can take weeks. Whilst it is true that the bottleneck is currently the physical sequencing process of things but pretty soon that is going to shift to the informatics.side.
[1] http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq_2500_1500/performance_specifications.ilmn
No, what causes disputes is a woman who sleeps with so many men that she cannot identify the father, or who sleeps with someone else and tries to trick a man into marrying her to take care of the child that the real father won't. Paternity tests only uncover the original unethical acts, it is not an unethical act in and of itself. It is those unethical acts that cause the disputes.
1. There is nothing specifically unethical in having multiple partners, as long as one discloses disease risks and there is not a presumption of monogamy.
2. Either biological parent may be interested in the results of a paternity test:
a) A man and woman may both know that there was more than one man with the woman, and all three (woman and at least 2 men) would have an interest in the outcome.
b) The female may wish to prove a man is involved when he denies a sexual relationship or claims contraceptive methods were adequate ("Can't be me, I wore a condom."). Also, a woman who bears a child from rape is still entitled to support even if the man is not convicted. This requires a paternity test.
c) A man may accuse a woman of having multiple partners and thus request a paternity test to attempt to show that he is not the father, proving her involvement with another man. Alternatively, a man may wish to prove that he is the father in a case when another man was involved with the woman near the time of conception, so as to prevent his child being raised by someone else.
So, other than claiming that promiscuity is a virtue, you're basically repeating the same things I said only in more words. Everything you said under (2) is basically what I said in one sentence: paternity tests allow determination of fatherhood for purposes of inheritance or child support.
I though it was already possible - dont u guys see CSI?
"Imagine..."
having no privacy.
and no health insurance.
the problem is how do you define "defect"??
I could see kids getting "edited" to correct things like excessive intelligence or self will (can't have a 95% person smarter than a 5% person or be able to get "uppity" )
Plus its been proven that if you select for %trait% and don't balance things out the person tends to be somewhat NUTS.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The main problem with your argument is - the only technology that can replicate itself these days is biotech. This and the incredibly low (and exponentially dropping) prices of this technology are the real reasons we must be far more cautious with biotechnology than other technologies. Sooner will a nutjob create a superbug in a garage lab than he would create skynet.
The created a new class of genetically gifted in society. This caused class tension with the ordinaries and defectives.
Unlike GATTACA, rapid testing would mean everyone is analyzed and databsed at birth or before. Then just rapid sub-testing of a few markers culd match the database instead full resequencing every identity check.
Everyone bashes conservatives on science ignorance or bias. As you pointed out the libertarian slashdoters have their version of junk science. Whenever I post a list of leftist junk science I get bashed too. All parties need to be more open minded and enlightened.
I see more and more of that. Right now fairly simple things are done. But with cheap sequencing and all the genetic unknowns out there I would not be surprised by some significant science fair discoveries.
I give it 6 years. Then we will have a complete scanner. Another year or two after that and it will be included in the handheld-bio-metric-scanner-device-thingy.