clhs sciblog

Swine flu and Bird flu are two recent flus that have scared most of the world. Especially with the swine flu, there have been many cases tested to see if they were that flu. Making detectors for these and other flus is expensive, but a USC led team of researchers believe they have made huge improvements in making a new detector. Their design is a synthetic antibody on a nanowire attached to an electrical base, and the wire is in liquid. If the antibody binds to certain proteins, it will create a jump in the current of the nanowire. Its differences from the other detectors are its use of bioengineered antibodys and a new type of nanowire. The detector prototype was for the SARS virus, which was a vast improvements in time, cost, and portability to the old detector. When tested, it preformed hundreds of times better then its predecessor. You can read the full article here.

I believe that these new detectors will be very helpful in detecting viruses. If it has the same improvements against older detectors, than it will make the job easier, cheaper, and less time consuming then before. A time difference of hours to just ten minutes is a huge one that means they can get through more of what they are testing. Overall, it makes things go faster, with the other advantage of being cheaper. It could also help in case of an epidemic, giving us a quicker way to detect the virus.