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To: Jim Oravetz who wrote (150)	7/12/2000 4:42:02 PM
From: Jim Oravetz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7143

Purdue biochip screens for pathogens in real-time By R. Colin Johnson , EE Times Jul 11, 2000 (11:43 AM) URL: eetimes.com WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — More than 500 lives were lost last year to a type of food poisoning that a new biochip could help prevent. Purdue University has designed a biochip that may save lives by detecting toxins in food immediately. The chip could speed diagnosis, test in real-time for poisoning (as opposed to the days currently required for food samples to be cultured) and even prevent tainted foods from ever being shipped. "It takes so long to test for food poisoning today that by the time the test is finished, much of the tainted food has already been delivered and consumed. We reduce the testing time to a matter of minutes," said Rashid Bashir, a researcher on the project. The chemical aspect of the design was handled by Michael Ladisch, and Arun Bhunia provided expertise in food science. It will still take a few years to engineer practical end-user commercial biochips, but by then they may be applicable to dozens of pathogens. "Soldiers could use [the chip] to identify airborne biological weapons, physicians could use it to diagnose common diseases, and farmers could even use it to identify crop diseases," said Bashir. Pharmaceutical developers could use it to identify the beneficial biochemicals in folk remedies. The key is protein matching. "A protein is like a lock that only a single key will open. We bond a protein to the biochip with electrostatic attraction that can only be opened by the molecule we're testing for," said Bashir. The first prototype-application biochip will be developed to detect the deadly pathogen Listeria monocytogenes in foods. According to Bashir, statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported roughly 2,500 Listeria cases, 20 percent of them fatal, for 1999. snip\/ Jim