Academics Andre's Research Biocuriosities Books Graduate School History of Science Hot off the Press Igor's Research Interdisciplinarity Molecule of the Month Open Access Philip's Research Philosophy of Science Physics Physicsworld.com
Backreaction Ceclia's Blog at PHD Comics Cocktail Party Physics Cosmic Variance The Daily Transcript Easternblot Everyday Scientist The Evilutionary Biologist Freelancing Science The Futile Cycle Good Math, Bad Math iMechanica in singulo Incoherently Scattered Ponderings Juniorprof Klara Stefflova Life of a Lab Rat The Loom Metadatta Mixed States Morning Coffee Physics Not Even Wrong Notes from the biomass Notional Slurry OpenScience Project Pharyngula PLoS Blog Ponderings of a fool Recombinants The Sandwalk SciAm Observations ScienceBlogs Scientific Clearing House Shtetl-Optimized Three-toed Sloth Uncertain Principles What's New by Bob Park
In the most recent issue of Nature Materials, a Letter describing a new quantum dot(QD)-based DNA nanosensor is presented, a technique that is entirely different from traditional microarray chips.
Due to the unique properties of QDs (see this wikipedia entry), a group from Johns Hopkins has found a way to label individual quantum dots with many copies of a short probe strand of DNA. Upon binding a dye-labelled reporter strand of DNA, the quantum dot and dyed reporter strand act as an acceptor-donor pair for fluorescence resonsance energy transfer—FRET—based detection.
Without bound reporter strands, background noise is near-zero, while a detectable signal is seen for as few as 50 bound reporter molecules to a single QD. As a proof-of-concept, they also report on detection of a reporter molecule with a single point mutations, typical of some ovarian tumors.
The full article is here, while Nature’s own News and Views article is here (subscription required for both).
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
