{"id":353,"date":"2008-11-15T20:54:16","date_gmt":"2008-11-15T20:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2008\/11\/15\/music_thats_bound_to_be_interesting\/"},"modified":"2010-12-26T22:16:30","modified_gmt":"2010-12-26T22:16:30","slug":"music_thats_bound_to_be_interesting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2008\/11\/15\/music_thats_bound_to_be_interesting\/","title":{"rendered":"Music that’s bound to be interesting"},"content":{"rendered":"

The inestimable Dr Rohn has, on more<\/a> than<\/a> one<\/a> occasion, sung<\/em> the praises of the engineering prowess of her lab-mates. But in this week\u2019s Nature music and ingenuity were combined to produce a new high note of technical wonderment. A fascinating News and Views<\/a> piece directed my attention to a recent paper<\/a>* by Hua-Zhong Yu and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Canada.<\/p>\n

The Yu group have created a \u2018home-made\u2019 micro-array on a music CD that just needs an ordinary CD player to scan the disk for the results of the binding assay.<\/p>\n

They did what!?!<\/p>\n

You heard right – and their system is impressively flexible since interactions involving DNA and protein can both be analysed. First, the CD is treated so that spots at defined positions on the surface will allow covalent attachment of DNA or proteins. Biotinylated DNA or protein samples are then added to perform the binding assay and in the final step the bound material captures strepavidin-labeled gold nanoparticles. A simple chemical treatment deposits silver on these gold seeds, so the tiny spots containing bound DNA or protein end up coated with silver clusters.<\/p>\n

Then comes the devilishly clever bit.<\/p>\n

The disk can be inserted into a standard CD player to analyse the results! Because music CDs have been designed to play back smoothly even when they get scratched or dirty, the music is encoded in a way that allows error detection and correction. The software analyzing the readout from the disk knows precisely where the errors on the disk lie. Now, normally you don’t care about the errors; you’re only interested in hearing a faithful rendition the toe-tapping tunes of your favourite combo (‘Hold on Tight’ by The Electric Light Orchestra<\/em> anyone?), but with freely-available software tools, you can access the error information and that is exactly what the Yu group have done.<\/p>\n

Since the silver clusters scatter the laser light just like a defect, each spot of bound proteins can be found on the treated disk. And not only that: the software also reports the size of the defect, which in this case is proportional to the amount of material bound, so the interaction can be analysed quantitatively. Yu and co showed they could measure DNA hybridisation, detect SNPs and determine antibody-antigen affinities.<\/p>\n

How cool is that? As Ian Dury put it, “There ain’t half been some clever bastards!”<\/p>\n

*Yunchao Li, Lily M. L. Ou, Hua-Zhong Yu (2008). Digitized Molecular Diagnostics: Reading Disk-Based Bioassays with Standard Computer Drives Analytical Chemistry, 80<\/span> (21), 8216-8223 DOI: 10.1021\/ac8012434<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The inestimable Dr Rohn has, on more than one occasion, sung the praises of the engineering prowess of her lab-mates. But in this week\u2019s Nature music and ingenuity were combined to produce a new high note of technical wonderment. A … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}