50 Chemistry Ideas You Really Need to Know (50 Ideas You Really Need to Know series) by Birch Hayley

Author:Birch, Hayley [Birch, Hayley]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781848666689
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2015-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

MICROCHIP MEETS DNA

The lab-on-a-chip concept emerged when scientists began to realize they could hijack conventional microchip fabrication technology (see here) to create miniaturized versions of standard laboratory experiments. In 1992, Swiss researchers showed they could carry out a common separation technique called capillary electrophoresis (see here) on a chip device. By 1994, chemist Adam Woolley’s team at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, was already separating DNA in tiny channels on a glass chip and, soon after, they used chips to carry out DNA sequencing. Today, DNA sequencing on glass and polymer chips has become perhaps the most important application of lab-on-a-chip technology, with chips capable of sequencing hundreds of samples in parallel and producing results in minutes.

Sequencing on a chip is no mean feat. It usually involves a technique called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that molecular biology has used for many years. The reaction depends on repeatedly heating and cooling DNA. To achieve this on a chip, samples in the channels have to be heated or forced through successive reaction chambers – each with a total volume below one-thousandth of a millilitre – at different temperatures. One major area of lab-on-a-chip technology is known as microfluidics. Because of the tiny volumes of liquid involved, most diagnostic chip devices are based on microfluidics.

The Internet of Life

You may have heard of the ‘Internet of Things’, a concept that draws on the idea that we are living in a world of increasingly smart devices that could all be connected by a single network. Smartphones, refrigerators, TVs and even microchipped dogs, could all be integrated into the network – via their microchips. Now researchers at QuantuMDx, a company based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, are planning an ‘Internet of Life’, which would integrate data produced by lab-on-a-chip devices all over the world. They suggest that DNA-sequencing data collected with chip devices could be geostamped, meaning it could be mapped to a specific geographical location. This would give epidemiologists access to unprecedented levels of detail for tracking disease in real time. They could monitor malaria, follow the evolution of the flu virus, help to predict Ebola outbreaks, identify new strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis and, hopefully, use all this information to help stop the spread.

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