Apr. 3, 2013 ? Talk about storing data in the cloud. Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland have taken this to a whole new level by demonstrating* that they can store visual images within quite an ethereal memory device — a thin vapor of rubidium atoms. The effort may prove helpful in creating memory for quantum computers.

Their work builds on an approach developed at the Australian National University, where scientists showed that a rubidium vapor could be manipulated in interesting ways using magnetic fields and lasers. The vapor is contained in a small tube and magnetized, and a laser pulse made up of multiple light frequencies is fired through the tube. The energy level of each rubidium atom changes depending on which frequency strikes it, and these changes within the vapor become a sort of fingerprint of the pulse’s characteristics. If the field’s orientation is flipped, a second pulse fired through the vapor takes on the exact characteristics of the first pulse — in essence, a readout of the fingerprint.

“With our paper, we’ve taken this same idea and applied it to storing an image — basically moving up from storing a single ‘pixel’ of light information to about a hundred,” says Paul Lett, a physicist with JQI and NIST’s Quantum Measurement Division. “By modifying their technique, we have been able to store a simple image in the vapor and extract pieces of it at different times.”

It’s a dramatic increase in the amount of information that can be stored and manipulated with this approach. But because atoms in a vapor are always in motion, the image can only be stored for about 10 milliseconds, and in any case the modifications the team made to the original technique introduce too much noise into the laser signal to make the improvements practically useful. So, should the term vaporware be applied here after all? Not quite, says Lett — because the whole point of the effort was not to build a device for market, but to learn more about how to create memory for next-generation quantum computers.

“What we’ve done here is store an image using classical physics. However, the ultimate goal is to store quantum information, which a quantum computer will need,” he says. “Measuring what the rubidium atoms do as we manipulate them is teaching us how we might use them as quantum bits and what problems those bits might present. This way, when someone builds a solid-state system for a finished computer, we’ll know how to handle them more effectively.”

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Journal Reference:

1. Jeremy B Clark, Quentin Glorieux, Paul D Lett. Spatially addressable readout and erasure of an image in a gradient echo memory. New Journal of Physics, 2013; 15 (3): 035005 DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/15/3/035005

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Article source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/biometric/~3/caDEXIsffb0/130404092829.htm

Mar. 13, 2013 ? A new method of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could routinely spot specific cancers, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and other maladies early, when they’re most treatable, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center suggest in the journal Nature.

Each body tissue and disease has a unique fingerprint that can be used to quickly diagnose problems, the scientists say.

By using new MRI technologies to scan for different physical properties simultaneously, the team differentiated white matter from gray matter from cerebrospinal fluid in the brain in about 12 seconds, with the promise of doing this much faster in the near future.

The technology has the potential to make an MRI scan standard procedure in annual check-ups, the authors believe. A full-body scan lasting just minutes would provide far more information and require no radiologist to interpret the data, making diagnostics cheap, compared to today’s scans, they contend.

“The overall goal is to specifically identify individual tissues and diseases, to hopefully see things and quantify things before they become a problem,” said Mark Griswold, a radiology professor at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and UH Case Medical Center. “But to try to get there, we’ve had to give up everything we knew about the MRI and start over.”

Griswold has been working on this goal with Case Western Reserve’s Vikas Gulani, MD, an assistant professor of radiology, and Nicole Seiberlich, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for a decade. During the last three years, they developed the technology and proved the concept with graduate student Dan Ma; Kecheng Liu, PhD, collaborations manager from Siemens Medical Solutions Inc.; Jeffrey L. Sunshine, MD, professor of radiology and a radiologist at UH Case Medical Center; and Jeffrey L. Duerk, dean of Case School of Engineering and professor of biomedical engineering.

A magnetic resonance imager uses a magnetic field and pulses of radio waves to create images of the body’s tissues and structures. Magnetic resonance fingerprinting, MRF for short, can obtain much more information with each measurement than a traditional MRI.

Griswold likens the difference in technologies to a pair of choirs.

“In the traditional MRI, everyone is singing the same song and you can tell who is singing louder, who is off-pitch, who is singing softer,” he said. “But that’s about it.”

The louder, softer and off-pitch singing is represented by dark, light or bright spots in the scan that a radiologist must interpret. For example, an MRI would show swelling as a bright area in an image. But brightness doesn’t necessarily equate with severity or cause.

“With an MRF,” Griswold said, “we hope that with one step we can tell the severity and exactly what’s happening in that area.”

The fingerprint of each tissue, each disease and each material inside the body is therefore a different song. In an MRF, each member of the choir sings a different song simultaneously, Griswold said. “What it sounds like in total is a randomized mess.”

The researchers generate unique songs by simultaneously varying different parts of the input electromagnetic fields that probe the tissues. These variations make the received signal sensitive to four physical properties that vary from tissue to tissue. These differences — the different notes and lyrics of their songs — become evident when applying pattern recognition programs using the same math in facial recognition software.

The patterns are then charted. Instead of looking at relative measurements from an image, Griswold said quantitative estimates told one tissue from another. As the technology progresses, these results will determine whether tissue is healthy or diseased, how badly and by what.

The scientists believe that they will be able to interrogate a total of eight or nine physical properties which will allow them to elicit the songs from a vast array of tissues, diseases and materials.

For a patient, an MRF would seem like a quick MRI. When the scan is done, all of the patient’s songs would be compared with the songbook, which will provide doctors with a suite of diagnostic information.

“If colon cancer is ‘Happy Birthday’ and we don’t hear ‘Happy Birthday,’ the patient doesn’t have colon cancer,” Griswold said.

Other researchers have tried to use multiple parameters in MRI’s, but this group was able to scan fast and with higher sensitivity than in previous attempts, he continued. “This research gives us hope. We can see that it’s possible the MRI can see all sorts of things.”

The group expects to reduce scanning time and continue to build the songbook, or library of fingerprints, over the next few years.

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Journal Reference:

1. Dan Ma, Vikas Gulani, Nicole Seiberlich, Kecheng Liu, Jeffrey L. Sunshine, Jeffrey L. Duerk, Mark A. Griswold. Magnetic resonance fingerprinting. Nature, 2013; 495 (7440): 187 DOI: 10.1038/nature11971

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Article source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/biometric/~3/pi2XWYMUnAo/130313142531.htm

Jan. 23, 2013 ? Forget digital fingerprints, iris recognition and voice identification, the next big thing in biometrics could be your knobbly knees. Just as a fingerprints and other body parts are unique to us as individuals and so can be used to prove who we are, so too are our kneecaps. Computer scientist Lior Shamir of Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan, has now demonstrated how a knee scan could be used to single us out.

The approach based on MRI could be used to quickly register and identify people in a moving queue as they approach passport control at airports for instance or as they walk through the entrance to an office block or other building.

Shamir has tested the approach and achieved accuracy of around 93 percent, this coupled with other factors such as possession of the correct passport, being in the right place at the right time or tied to other biometrics such as iris recognition and signature analysis could be used to prevent deception and fraud. Contact lenses can be used to dupe iris recognition systems, passports can be forged.

“Deceptive manipulation requires an invasive and complicated medical procedure, and therefore it is more resistant to spoofing compared to methods such as face, fingerprints, or iris,” Shamir points out. It would be almost impossible to fake one’s internal body parts including the kneecaps. Of course, kneecaps are a renowned target of irreversible and deleterious adjustment in the criminal world, but even then shattered kneecaps are likely to be unique to the victim in any case.

MRI scanning avoids health risk of scanning with ionizing radiation, such as X-rays, it would also avoid some of the privacy issues that have arisen with terahertz scanners that can “see” beneath a person’s clothing, whereas MRI goes more than skin deep. There is a distinct problem with the implementation of MRI scanning in a security setting in that MRI scanners are very large machines and take a long time to acquire an image of even a small body part such as the kneecap. However, developments in MRI technology are fast moving and it is likely that within the medium term more portable and faster equipment will emerge that could fulfill the security role.

“Further studies will develop the concept of internal biometrics, and will lead to automatic identification methods that are highly resistant to spoofing,” concludes Shamir.

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Journal Reference:

1. Lior Shamir. MRI-based knee image for personal identification. International Journal of Biometrics, 2013 (in press)

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Dec. 19, 2012 ? A laser capable of working in the terahertz range – that of long-wavelength light from the far infrared to 1 millimeter – takes a better ‘fingerprint’ of, say, a drug under investigation, than a traditional chemical analysis. PhD student Thomas Denis of the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology has now combined  a free electron source with photonic crystals. The result: greater flexibility and a compact laser.

A terahertz laser is capable of showing the molecular structure of, say, a drug, because the laser beam it produces is at wavelengths suitable for examining molecular and atomic bonds. This enables more spatial information to be obtained than from chemical analysis, a detailed fingerprint. To date, however, the limitation has been that lasers of this type are restricted to particular wavelengths, e.g. because the source of the laser light is a semiconductor, in which electrons can only take on fixed energy states, hence only a limited number of ‘colours’ of light can be produced.

Free electrons

In a free electron laser the electrons are not restricted to fixed states, as are electrons in a classic cathode ray tube. So Denis thought, why not combine a free electron source with a ‘photonic crystal’? This is a structure with lot of tiny ‘posts’ that together slow down the incident light and turn it into a coherent beam. Photonic crystals can be created at micro level, e.g. for a lab-on-a-chip, or on a much larger scale. The dimensions and shape of the crystal determine the rough wavelength region, and the precise wavelength can be set and adjusted by changing the speed of the electrons being fired at it. This combination is known as a ‘photonic free-electron laser’ or pFEL.

Looking inside the crystal

Existing terahertz lasers also have the disadvantage that they are very large, big enough to fill a room. Thanks to the use of photonic crystals the pFEL that Denis has designed is not much bigger than a domestic microwave oven and can still provide high power despite its small size. He has also found a special way of ‘looking’ inside a photonic crystal — something that is not normally possible. By interfering slightly with the wavelength pattern in the crystal using a tiny metal ball the actual pattern can be measured.

Thomas Denis (Ahaus, 1981) received his PhD on 14 December for his thesis Theory and Design of Microwave Photonic Free-Electron Lasers. He carried out his research in Prof. Klaus Boller’s Laser Physics and Non-linear Optics Group. The thesis, or the summary, is available in digital form on request.

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Dec. 19, 2012 ? A new device about the size of a business card could allow health care providers to test for insulin and other blood proteins, cholesterol, and even signs of viral or bacterial infection all at the same time — with one drop of blood. Preliminary tests of the V-chip, created by scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute and MD Anderson Cancer Center, were just published by Nature Communications.

“The V-Chip could make it possible to bring tests to the bedside, remote areas, and other types of point-of-care needs,” said Nanomedicine faculty member Lidong Qin, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator. “V-Chip is accurate, cheap, and portable. It requires only a drop of a sample, not a vial of blood, and can do 50 different tests in one go.”

Similar assays are typically done using heavy, large, complex equipment such as mass spectrometers, or require fluoroscopy analysis, which must also be done in a lab.

The V-chip, short for “volumetric bar-chart chip,” on the other hand, can be carried around in a pocket. It is composed of two thin pieces of glass, about 3 in. by 2 in. In between are wells for four things: (1) hydrogen peroxide, (2) up to 50 different antibodies to specific proteins, DNA or RNA fragments, or lipids of interest, and the enzyme catalase, (3) serum or other sample, and (4) a dye — any dye will do. Initially, the wells are kept separate from each other. A shift in the glass plates brings the wells into contact, creating a contiguous, zig-zagged space from one end of the V-chip to the other.

As the substance of interest — say, insulin — binds to antibodies bound to the glass slide, catalase is made active and splits nearby hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen gas. This approach is called ELISA, or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The oxygen pushes the dye up the column. The more present insulin is, the more oxygen is created, and the farther dye is pushed up the slide. Tests show that distance is more or less proportional to the amount of substrate present, in this example, insulin. The end result is a visual bar chart. Easy to read and accurate, Qin says, though development continues.

“The sensitivity of the V-chip can be improved if narrower and longer bar channels are used,” Qin said. “Our next steps are to make the device more user friendly and be so simple to use, it barely needs instructions.”

Qin is also a Weill Cornell Medical College assistant professor of cell and developmental biology.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Methodist Hospital, Houston, via Newswise.

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Journal Reference:

1. Yujun Song, Yuanqing Zhang, Paul E. Bernard, James M. Reuben, Naoto T. Ueno, Ralph B. Arlinghaus, Youli Zu, Lidong Qin. Multiplexed volumetric bar-chart chip for point-of-care diagnostics. Nature Communications, 2012; 3: 1283 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2292

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Article source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/biometric/~3/beKv54NZu-g/121219152621.htm

Dec. 18, 2012 ? Cell phones are getting ever smarter today, savvy enough to tell you where to go and what to buy in shopping centers or department stores. Although still in nascent stages, indoor positioning and navigation using mobile phones will be arriving anytime soon.

People widely rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for location information, but unlike outdoor environments, GPS does not work well in indoor spaces or urban canyons with streets cutting through dense blocks of high-rise buildings and structures. GPS requires a clear view to communicate with satellites because its signals become attenuated or scattered by roofs, walls, and other objects. In addition, GPS is only one-third as accurate in the vertical direction as it is in the horizontal, thus impossible to locate a person or an object in the floors of skyscrapers.

For indoor positioning, location-based service providers including mobile device makers have mostly used a combination of GPS and wireless network system such as WiFi, cellular connectivity, Ultra Wide Band (UWB), or Radio-frequency Identification (RFID). For example, the WiFi Positioning System (WPS) collects both GPS and WiFi signals, and many companies including Google and Apple utilize this technology to provide clients with location information services.

Professor Dong-Soo Han from the Department of Computer Science, KAIST, explained, “WPS is helpful to a certain extent, but it is not sufficient because the technology needs GPS signals to tag the location of WiFi fingerprints collected from mobile devices. Therefore, even if you are surrounded in rich WiFi signals, they can be useless unless they are accompanied with GPS signals. Our research team tried to solve this problem, and finally we came up with a radio map that is created based on WiFi fingerprints only.”

Professor Han and his research team have recently developed a new method to build a WiFi radio map that does not require GPS signals. WiFi fingerprints are a set of WiFi signals captured by a mobile device and the measurements of received WiFi signal strengths (RSSs) from surrounding access points at the device. A WiFi radio map shows RSSs of WiFi access points (APs) at different locations in a given environment. Therefore, each WiFi fingerprint on the radio map is connected to location information.

The KAIST research team collected fingerprints from users’ smartphones every 30 minutes through the modules embedded in mobile platforms, utilities, or applications and analyzed the characteristics of the collected fingerprints. As a result, Professor Dong-Soo Han said, “We discovered that mobile devices such as cell phones are not necessarily on the move all the time, meaning that they have locations where they stay for a certain period of time on a regular basis. If you have a full-time job, then your phone, at least, have a fixed location of home and office.”

By taking smartphone users’ home and office address as location reference, Professor Han classified fingerprints collected from the phones into two groups: home and office. He then converted each home and office address into geographic coordinates (with the help of Google’s geocoding) to obtain the location of the collected fingerprints. The WiFi radio map has both the fingerprints and coordinates whereby the location of the phones can be identified or tracked.

For evaluation, the research team selected four areas in Korea (a mix of commercial and residential locations), collected 7,000 WiFi fingerprints at 400 access points in each area, and created a WiFi radio map, respectively. The tests, conducted in each area, showed that location accuracy becomes hinged on the volume of data collected, and once the data collection rate hits over 50%, the average error distance is within less than 10m.

Professor Han added, “Although there seems to be many issues like privacy protection that has to be cleared away before commercializing this technology, it is no doubt that we will face a greater demand for indoor positioning system in the near future. People will eventually want to know where they are indoors just as much as outdoors.”

Once the address-based radio map is fully developed for commercial use, identifying locations at the home and office level will be possible, thereby opening a new door for further applications such as emergency rescue services or indoor location-based services like finding lost cell phones, restaurants, stores, and missing persons, as well as providing information on sales and discount

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Dec. 17, 2012 ? Cell phones are getting ever smarter today, savvy enough to tell you where to go and what to buy in shopping centers or department stores. Although still in nascent stages, indoor positioning and navigation using mobile phones will be arriving anytime soon.

People widely rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for location information, but unlike outdoor environments, GPS does not work well in indoor spaces or urban canyons with streets cutting through dense blocks of high-rise buildings and structures. GPS requires a clear view to communicate with satellites because its signals become attenuated or scattered by roofs, walls, and other objects. In addition, GPS is only one-third as accurate in the vertical direction as it is in the horizontal, thus impossible to locate a person or an object in the floors of skyscrapers.

For indoor positioning, location-based service providers including mobile device makers have mostly used a combination of GPS and wireless network system such as WiFi, cellular connectivity, Ultra Wide Band (UWB), or Radio-frequency Identification (RFID). For example, the WiFi Positioning System (WPS) collects both GPS and WiFi signals, and many companies including Google and Apple utilize this technology to provide clients with location information services.

Professor Dong-Soo Han from the Department of Computer Science, KAIST, explained, “WPS is helpful to a certain extent, but it is not sufficient because the technology needs GPS signals to tag the location of WiFi fingerprints collected from mobile devices. Therefore, even if you are surrounded in rich WiFi signals, they can be useless unless they are accompanied with GPS signals. Our research team tried to solve this problem, and finally we came up with a radio map that is created based on WiFi fingerprints only.”

Professor Han and his research team have recently developed a new method to build a WiFi radio map that does not require GPS signals. WiFi fingerprints are a set of WiFi signals captured by a mobile device and the measurements of received WiFi signal strengths (RSSs) from surrounding access points at the device. A WiFi radio map shows RSSs of WiFi access points (APs) at different locations in a given environment. Therefore, each WiFi fingerprint on the radio map is connected to location information.

The KAIST research team collected fingerprints from users’ smartphones every 30 minutes through the modules embedded in mobile platforms, utilities, or applications and analyzed the characteristics of the collected fingerprints. As a result, Professor Dong-Soo Han said, “We discovered that mobile devices such as cell phones are not necessarily on the move all the time, meaning that they have locations where they stay for a certain period of time on a regular basis. If you have a full-time job, then your phone, at least, have a fixed location of home and office.”

By taking smartphone users’ home and office address as location reference, Professor Han classified fingerprints collected from the phones into two groups: home and office. He then converted each home and office address into geographic coordinates (with the help of Google’s geocoding) to obtain the location of the collected fingerprints. The WiFi radio map has both the fingerprints and coordinates whereby the location of the phones can be identified or tracked.

For evaluation, the research team selected four areas in Korea (a mix of commercial and residential locations), collected 7,000 WiFi fingerprints at 400 access points in each area, and created a WiFi radio map, respectively. The tests, conducted in each area, showed that location accuracy becomes hinged on the volume of data collected, and once the data collection rate hits over 50%, the average error distance is within less than 10m.

Professor Han added, “Although there seems to be many issues like privacy protection that has to be cleared away before commercializing this technology, it is no doubt that we will face a greater demand for indoor positioning system in the near future. People will eventually want to know where they are indoors just as much as outdoors.”

Once the address-based radio map is fully developed for commercial use, identifying locations at the home and office level will be possible, thereby opening a new door for further applications such as emergency rescue services or indoor location-based services like finding lost cell phones, restaurants, stores, and missing persons, as well as providing information on sales and discount

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Article source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/biometric/~3/v2m2gSeczhw/121217140629.htm

Aug. 2, 2010 ? Nothing against bloodhounds, but finding bodies buried by someone who wanted them to stay undiscovered can be difficult. However a new technique developed by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), can reliably detect biochemical changes in a decomposing cadaver.

Typically, cadaver-sniffing dogs or ground penetrating radar are used to detect clandestine gravesites. But these methods are not always useful in all scenarios, such as if a body is buried under concrete. The NIST instrument is a modification of a technique developed at the lab to sense minute levels of difficult-to-detect chemical compounds. The process uses an alumina-coated, porous layer, open tubular (PLOT) column with a motorized pipette that pulls in air samples at ambient temperatures. The device detects trace amounts of ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen (NRN) that collects in air pockets above and close to gravesoil. Previously, this process involved the tedious and expensive process of solvent extraction of soil samples. Now, a simple probe slightly thicker than a human hair can be inserted into the ground to detect decaying flesh.

Developed by NIST chemists Thomas J. Bruno and Tara M. Lovestead and spelled out in a paper published in Forensic Science International, this is the only known example of detecting NRN in the vapor phase and gives detectives another tool for finding hidden graves. Moreover, Bruno said that the device can be used to detect a body buried under a concrete slab, merely by drilling a one-eighth-inch hole and inserting the probe, thereby eliminating the need for unnecessary digging.

Bruno and Lovestead used frozen, dead feeder rats for their study and took samples of rats buried under 8 centimeters of soil, laid on top of the soil and from boxes with no dead rats in them. They took samples at one week intervals for six weeks and then again at 10 and 20 weeks and found that after five weeks, the amount of NRN was at its highest, but it was still detectable after 20 weeks.

The device operates at room temperatures, as opposed to ultra-cold temperatures, which is a big plus for future portability as well as the fact that it employs chemicals already in use by law enforcement officials (ninhydrin reagent) for exposing latent fingerprints. Bruno is working on making a portable version of the instrument — at present only the sampling device is portable; testing of samples must still be done in the lab — giving this new device and detection process great promise for use by law enforcement officials in the field.

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Journal Reference:

1. Tara M. Lovestead, Thomas J. Bruno. Detecting gravesoil with headspace analysis with adsorption on short porous layer open tubular (PLOT) columns. Forensic Science International, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2010.05.024

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Aug. 12, 2010 ? DNA microarrays are one of the most powerful tools in molecular biology today. The devices, which can be used to probe biological samples and detect particular genes or genetic sequences, are employed in everything from forensic analysis to disease detection to drug development.

Now Paul Li and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada have combined DNA microarrays with microfluidic devices, which are used for the precise control of liquids at the nanoscale. In an upcoming issue of the journal Biomicrofluidics, which is published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), Li and his colleagues describe how the first combined device can be used for probing and detecting DNA.

The key to Li’s result: gold nanoparticles. Suspended in liquid and mixed with DNA, the nanometer-scale spheres of gold act as mini magnets that adhere to each of the DNA’s twin strands. When the DNA is heated, the two strands separate, and the gold nanoparticles keep them apart, which allows the single strands to be probed with other pieces of DNA that are engineered to recognize particular sequences.

Li, whose work is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, is applying for a patent for his technique. He sees a host of benefits from the combination of DNA microarrays and microfluidics.

“It’s faster and requires a relatively small sample,” he says, adding in his paper that “the whole procedure is accomplished at room temperature in an hour and apparatus for high temperature… is not required”

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1. Lin Wang and Paul C. Li. Gold nanoparticle-assisted single base-pair mismatch discrimination on a microfluidic microarray device. Biomicrofluidics, 2010; (in press) [link]

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Aug. 5, 2010 ? A newly developed test could make checking DNA from people arrested for crimes with DNA samples from crime scenes stored in forensic databases almost as easy as matching fingerprints. With the test, police could check on whether a person’s DNA matches that found at past crime scenes while suspects are still being processed and before a decision on whether to release them on bail. A report on the fast forensic test appears in the ACS’ Analytical Chemistry.

Andrew Hopwood, Frederic Zenhausern, and colleagues explain that some criminals are arrested, spend less than a day in jail, and then commit crimes while they are out on bail. If police could quickly test the suspects’ DNA, to see if their genetic material matches entries in crime databases, they may be able to keep the most dangerous people locked up. But currently, most genetic tests take 24-72 hours, and by the time that the results are back, the suspects often have been released.

To increase the speed of forensic DNA testing, the scientists built a chip that can copy and analyze DNA samples taken from a cotton swab. Forensic technicians can collect DNA from suspects by swabbing their mouth, mixing the sample with a few chemicals, and warming it up. The DNA-testing-lab-on-a-chip does the rest. The entire process takes only four hours at present. Hopwood and Zenhausern teams are already optimizing it and reducing the cycle time down to two hours. Once that is done, police could even double-check their DNA evidence before releasing a suspect.

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1. Hopwood et al. Integrated Microfluidic System for Rapid Forensic DNA Analysis: Sample Collection to DNA Profile. Analytical Chemistry, 2010; 100722135800024 DOI: 10.1021/ac101355r

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Article source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/biometric/~3/hjyPEAd7p-s/100804122715.htm