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Sunday, April 17, 2022

Detecting Viruses in Saliva

Sensor application in h\Healthcare

Computer Made From DNA-Coated Beads Could Detect Viruses in Saliva

New Scientist, Carissa Wong,March 28, 2022

Emory University's Khalid Salaita and colleagues built a computer from DNA-coated glass microbeads that could massively boost parallel processing power. The beads either roll or stall on the surface of a gold substrate, depending on how the DNA strands engage with matching RNA molecules affixed to the chip's surface; rolling and stalling are equivalent to outputs of 1 and 0, respectively. The computation's results can be detected by tracking the beads' motion using a smartphone camera with an attached magnifying glass, which Salaita estimated takes 15 minutes. Adding a DNA "lock complex" into the computer enabled the presence or absence of a specific DNA molecule to control bead movement. Salaita said, "One hundred-fold is a conservative estimate of how much more parallel processing we can do with our DNA computer compared to ones that use fluorescent labels."

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