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Blog – Page 11741

Very cool.

Pinpointing the type of bacteria that are at the root of an infection in clinical samples removed from living tissues, such as blood, urine or joint fluids, to quickly identify the best anti-microbial therapy still poses a formidable challenge. The standard method of culturing can take days to reveal pathogens, and they often fail to bring them to light altogether.

A team lead by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University now reports a method in PLoS, which enables the rapid isolation and concentration of infectious bacteria from complex clinical samples to help speed up bacterial identification, and it should be able to accelerate the determination of antibiotic susceptibilities as well.

“We leveraged FcMBL? the genetically engineered pathogen-binding protein we developed for our sepsis therapeutic device program? to develop a fast and simple technology to help overcome this diagnostic roadblock,” said Ingber, who is the Wyss Institute’s Founding Director, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Using clinical samples of joint fluids, we were able to show that this method can be used to quickly and efficiently isolate bacterial pathogens for various kinds of subsequent analysis, including PCR, which is commonly used for molecular diagnostics in clinical laboratories.”

Continue reading “Engineered pathogen-binding protein enables rapid isolation of infectious bacteria from joint fluids” | >

Silicon Valley is trying a new approach in get new tech into the US government (states, counties, and cities/ towns) hands.

I think most of us can agree that the internet poses some unique and wide-scale risks to our privacy.

Our every move online can be — and often is — tracked. In the past, it might have been hard for companies or the government to know your interests, political leanings, religious affiliation or health problems. But they can glean all that and more by simply watching what you do on the internet.

With a few exceptions, the government has failed to meaningfully curtail the data collection or help consumers gain some real control or choice over it. And industry self-regulation has been a joke.

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Featuring backside-illuminated sensor technology providing 95% quantum efficiency, the Prime 95B from 2016 Innovators Awards silver-level honoree Photometrics is reportedly three times more sensitive than the current generation of sCMOS cameras. The camera features a GSENSE400BSI-TVISB scientific CMOS (sCMOS) sensor from Gpixel Inc., which is a 1.44 MPixel sensor with a 11 µm square pixel size that can achieve a frame rate of 41 fps in 16-bit and 82 fps in 12-bit. The Prime 95B, according to Photometrics, is optimized for low-light microscopy and life sciences imaging applications because of its ability to collect nearly all available light, and maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of the experiment while minimizing cellular photo damage. Additionally, the camera features forced air or liquid cooling options, as well as a PCIe and USB 3.0 interfaces.

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The ability to track molecular events inside the cells of living organisms offers a powerful window into fundamental biological processes, but methods for visualizing RNA in vivo without interfering with cell processes have been elusive. Now, researchers have developed a light-induced chemical reaction that accomplishes this feat in live zebrafish embryos (ACS Cent. Sci. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.6b00054). It is the first technique for detecting specific strings of nucleic acids in live vertebrates that doesn’t require genetically modifying the organism. What’s more, it’s sensitive enough to visualize the expression of microRNAs, small noncoding RNAs that act as puppetmasters of gene expression.

To do the reaction, chemical biologist Nicolas Winssinger, biochemist Marcos Gonzalez-Gaitan, and their colleagues at the University of Geneva designed two nucleic acid probes that each complement and bind to adjacent halves of a target microRNA sequence. The researchers conjugated one probe to a ruthenium complex that absorbs visible light and the other to a fluorogenic rhodamine that lights up when its azide bonds are cleaved. When the probes attach to the target sequence, the two reagents come close enough to react. Shining a light on the sample activates the ruthenium which then reduces the azide in the rhodamine conjugate, releasing its fluorescence. The dependence on external light allows researchers to control when the reporting reaction happens, Winssinger explains.

The team first developed the system three years ago (Chem. 2013, DOI: 10.1002/chem.201300060) for use in cultured cells; here, they adapted it for use in just-fertilized zebrafish embryos. “That’s really not trivial,” says Winssinger. The probes had to be nontoxic, stable for a day or more, and powerful enough to work even after being diluted through cell division.

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