{"id":203692,"date":"2025-01-14T03:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-01-14T09:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/amplification-trick-makes-water-toxin-detection-10-times-more-sensitive"},"modified":"2025-01-14T03:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T09:09:07","slug":"amplification-trick-makes-water-toxin-detection-10-times-more-sensitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/amplification-trick-makes-water-toxin-detection-10-times-more-sensitive","title":{"rendered":"Amplification trick makes water toxin detection 10 times more sensitive"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/logo.amplification-trick-makes-water-toxin-detection-10-times-more-sensitive2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An unplugged electric instrument may function, but it sounds much better when it is connected to an amplifier. Similarly, toxins and other small molecules at low concentrations in the environment or human body may emit quiet signals that are undetectable without specialized lab technology.<\/p>\n<p>Now, thanks to a \u201ccool trick\u201d in biochemistry used to adapt a sensing platform already being deployed by Northwestern scientists to measure toxins in drinking water, researchers can detect and even measure chemicals at low enough concentrations to have use outside the lab. By attaching circuitry akin to a volume knob to \u201cturn up\u201d weak signals, the team has opened the door for the system to be applied to disease detection and monitoring in the human body for <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/nucleic+acids\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">nucleic acids<\/a> like DNA and RNA, as well as bacteria such as E. coli.<\/p>\n<p>The results, which describe a system that is 10 times more sensitive than previous cell-free sensors built by the team, are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41589-024-01816-w\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An unplugged electric instrument may function, but it sounds much better when it is connected to an amplifier. Similarly, toxins and other small molecules at low concentrations in the environment or human body may emit quiet signals that are undetectable without specialized lab technology. Now, thanks to a \u201ccool trick\u201d in biochemistry used to adapt [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}