Scientists develop virus-detecting lab on a chip
A team of scientists has created an inexpensive microchip that reliably detects viruses at low concentrations.
Engineers and chemists at Brigham Young University created the silicon chip, which sorts particles by size like a Coinstar machine, allowing for the accumulation of particles that could be missed by other tests that require high concentrations of a virus for accuracy.
Like a coin sorter, each chip's slot is set a little smaller than the size of the particle to be detected. After particles get trapped against that level's wall, they form a line visible with a special camera.
The development is a step toward helping doctors and lab technicians test patients for early detection of specific proteins or viruses, allowing them to respond before symptoms arise or conditions worsen.
The chip could also help researchers consistently obtain pure samples of viruses for faster and more accurate inspection.
The chip's inexpensive nature is important to the development, since the cost of machinery precise enough to make chips with nano-sized parts necessary for medical and biological applications is an astounding $100 million.
The BYU researchers instead used a simpler machine to form two dimensions in micrometers, which is one-hundredth of a millimeter and 1,000 times larger than a nanometer.
By placing a 50 nanometer-thin layer of metal onto the chip, topping that with glass deposited by gasses and using an acid to wash away the thin metal, researchers created the third dimension.
For now, the chips have only one slot size, but the team says it will soon make chips with progressively smaller slots, allowing for one chip to screen for particles of many sizes.
Here's a video of BYU professor Aaron Hawkins, who supervised the project, discussing the chip:
Appropriately, the researchers published their progress in Lab on a Chip, the top scientific journal devoted to the creation of chip-based biological tests.
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com