Faster and faster in biological sciences.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 2, 2010 – Fictional candy maker Willy Wonka called his whimsical device to sort good chocolate eggs from bad, an eggucator. Likewise, by determining what enzymes and compounds to keep and which to discard, scientists are aiming to find their own golden eggs: more potent drugs and cleaner sources of energy.
Toward that end, Harvard researchers and a team of international collaborators demonstrated a new microfluidic sorting device that rapidly analyzes millions of biological reactions. Smaller than an iPod Nano, the device analyzes reactions a 1,000-times faster and uses 10 million-fold less volumes of reagent than conventional state-of-the-art robotic methods.
The scientists anticipate that the invention could reduce screening costs by 1 million-fold and make directed evolution, a means of engineering tailored biological compounds, more commonplace in the lab.
The tubes in it are narrower than a human hair. Imagine future generations of microfluidic devices usable by non-scientists. Wondering if you have a bacterial or viral infection? You'll have a device that will figure that out for you without your going to a doctor. Parents who want to forecast how fast little Jill or Johnnie will get over a fever will be able to get an instant diagnosis and probable duration of each cold and sore throat.
While personal microfluidic devices will be pretty cool and very useful the biggest benefits from microfluidics will come in research labs. Microfluidics is starting to do for biological sciences what silicon microcircuitry has been and continues to do for the computer industry (i.e. massive fast moving revolution lasting decades). I am optimistic about the development of full body rejuvenation therapies mostly due to advances in microfluidics and other biological assay and manipulation microdevices. They work faster with higher sensitivity, cost less, and achieve a much higher degree of automation.
Picture a fully robotic laboratory where huge racks of microfluidic chips continuously conduct simultaneous experiments on millions of cells. That's where I see cellular biology headed. Humans will just program experiments and analyze experimental results. A Johns Hopkins team has developed a device that I think is a step on the road toward totally automated labs. A chip can control the environment of a single nerve cell and feed it controlled amounts of chemicals to see how the cell responds to growth signals.
Johns Hopkins researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine have devised a micro-scale tool - a lab on a chip - designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain. The system should help scientists better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together to form the nervous system.
A report on the work appears as the cover story in the February 2008 issue of the British journal Lab on a Chip.
”The chip we’ve developed will make experiments on nerve cells more simple to conduct and to control,” says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and faculty affiliate of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology.
Nerve cells decide which direction to grow by sensing both the chemical cues flowing through their environment as well as those attached to the surfaces that surround them. The chip, which is made of a plastic-like substance and covered with a glass lid, features a system of channels and wells that allow researchers to control the flow of specific chemical cocktails around single nerve cells.
“It is difficult to establish ideal experimental conditions to study how neurons react to growth signals because so much is happening at once that sorting out nerve cell connections is hard, but the chip, designed by experts in both brain chemistry and engineering, offers a sophisticated way to sort things out,” says Guo-li Ming, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Institute for Cell Engineering.
In experiments with their chip, the researchers put single nerve cells, or neurons, onto the chip then introduced specific growth signals (in the form of chemicals). They found that the growing neurons turned and grew toward higher concentrations of certain chemical cues attached to the chip’s surfaces, as well as to signaling molecules free-flowing in solution.
Chips such as these lend themselves to cheap mass manufacture. The chips will improve in successive generations just as computer chips do. They will become better integrated with each other and robot devices will install them and tend to them. Eventually we'll see fully automated lights-out labs analogous to lights out manufacturing plants which companies seek to achieve in order to minimize manufacturing labor costs.