Science Daily September 15, 2022 To evaluate the impact of mutations on 17 antibodies used in 11 commercially available antigen tests with emergency use authorization a team of researchers in the US (Emory University, Baylor College, industry) measured antibody binding for all possible Nucleocapsid point mutations using a mammalian surface-display platform and deep mutational scanning. The results provided a complete map of the antibodies’ epitopes and their susceptibility to mutational escape. Their data predicted no vulnerabilities for detection of mutations found in variants of concern. They confirmed this using the commercial tests and sequence-confirmed COVID-19 patient samples. The antibody escapes […]
Tag Archives: Sensor
Novel microfluidic chip can detect contaminants in 100-picoliter samples
Nanowerk June 27, 2022 Researchers in Japan have developed a nonlinear optical crystal-based compact terahertz (THz)-microfluidic chip with several I-design meta-atoms for attomole (amol)-level sensing of trace amounts of solution samples. The chip consists of a metallic strip with a micrometer-sized gap sandwiched by other metallic strips. A point THz source locally generated by optical rectification at the irradiation spot of a femtosecond-pulse laser beam induced a tightly confined electric-field mode at the gap regions and modified the resonance frequency when a microchannel fabricated along the space between the metallic strips was filled with solutions. Using this chip, they could […]
Graphene underpins a new platform to selectively ID deadly strains of bacteria
Technology.org March 24, 2020 Point-of-care diagnostics that can reduce and/or prevent unneeded antibiotic prescriptions require highly specific probes with sensitive and accurate transducers that can be miniaturized and multiplexed, and that are easy to operate and cheap. Researchers at Boston College present several advances in the use of graphene field effect transistors (G-FET) including the first use of peptide probes to electrically detect antibiotic resistant bacteria in a highly specific manner. They have reduced the needed concentration for detection by employing dielectrophoresis which allows monitoring changes in the Dirac point due to individual bacterial cells. Rapid binding of bacterial cells […]
Gene Editors Could Find New Use as Rapid Detectors of Pathogenic Threats
DARPA News November 15, 2019 The overarching goal of Detect It with Gene Editing Technologies (DIGET) is to provide comprehensive, specific, and trusted information about health threats to medical decision-makers within minutes, even in far-flung regions of the globe, to prevent the spread of disease, enable timely deployment of countermeasures, and improve the standard of care after diagnosis. The DIGET vision incorporates two devices: a handheld, disposable point-of-need device that screens samples for at least 10 pathogens or host biomarkers at once, combined with a massively multiplexed detection platform capable of screening clinical and environmental samples for more than 1,000 […]
Researchers capture moving object with ghost imaging
Science Daily November 13, 2019 Ghost imaging has been limited to stationary objects because it takes a long time to project the sequence of light patterns onto the object that is necessary to reconstruct an image making blurry. The ghost imaging technique forms an image by correlating a beam that interacts with the object and a reference beam that does not interact with te object. Individually, the beams don’t carry any meaningful information about the object. To apply ghost imaging to moving objects researchers in China used a small number of light patterns to capture the position and trajectory of […]
Preventing manipulation in automated face recognition
Fraunhofer Research October 1, 2019 In morphing processes two facial images are melded into a single synthetic facial image that contains the characteristics of both persons. As a result, biometric face recognition systems authenticate the identity of both persons based on this manipulated photo. Morphing attacks can take place before or during the process of applying for an ID document. To address this problem researchers in Germany are developing a process that identifies the image anomalies that occur during digital image processing focusing on analyzing and researching simulated imaging data using image processing, machine learning methods, and deep neural networks […]
Nanowires replace Newton’s famous glass prism
Phys.org September 5, 2019 An international team of researchers (UK, China) used a nanowire whose material composition is varied along its length, enabling it to be responsive to different colours of light across the visible spectrum. They created a series of light-responsive sections on this nanowire. Individual responses from the nanowire sections can then be directly fed into a computer algorithm to reconstruct the incident light spectrum. Every pixel of the device contains data points from across the visible spectrum, providing detailed information. This can tell us, for instance, about chemical processes occurring in the frame of the image. One […]
Antennas of flexible nanotube films an alternative for electronics
Science Daily June 10, 2019 Early work on carbon nanotube (CNT) antennas indicated that their performance could not match that of metals such as copper. However, recent improvements in fluid phase CNT processing have yielded macroscopic CNT materials with better alignment and conductivity. A team of researchers in the US (Rice University, NIST) conducted radiation efficiency measurements of microstrip patch antennas made of shear-aligned CNT films measuring radiation efficiency of 94% at 10 GHz and 14 GHz, matching equivalent copper antennas. The minimum CNT film thickness required to match the performance of copper drops with increasing frequency due to reduced losses […]
Biological invisibility cloak: Elucidating cuttlefish camouflage
Science Daily October 18, 2018 Among all animals, cuttlefish, squid and octopuses control their appearance by the direct action of neurons onto expandable pixels, numbered in millions, located in their skin. Researchers in Germany peered into the brain of the cuttlefish and its camouflage control system. They derived minimal rules that may explain skin morphogenesis. They found that chromatophores (specialized skin cells) systematically change colors over time. The study opens a large range of new questions and opportunities in field of cognitive computational neuroscience; help define the precise link between brain activity and behavior and help identify the cellular rules […]