UCLA scientists have developed a new technology to perform more than a thousand chemical reactions simultaneously on a computer-controlled microchip the size of a postage stamp, which could speed up the identification of substances that can be used as drugs for diseases such as cancer and others
Test tubes, powders and heating plates will soon be a thing of the past in chemical laboratories. Instead of conducting experiments in a chemical fume hood, or at a desk, scientists could simply insert a microchip into a computer and immediately run thousands of chemical reactions, with the result of minimizing the laboratory to the size of a fingernail.
In order to achieve this goal, UCLA scientists have developed a state-of-the-art technology to perform more than a thousand chemical reactions simultaneously on a computer-controlled microchip the size of a postage stamp, which could accelerate the identification of candidate substances to be used as drugs for diseases such as cancer and others. The study was published online in the journal Lab on a Chip.
A team of chemists, biologists and engineers from the University of UCLA collaborated to develop this technology, based on fluid micromechanics - the utilization of miniaturized automatic devices for the treatment and flow of tiny amounts of liquids and chemicals, amounts so small that they are not visible to the human eye. The chemical reactions were carried out using "in situ click chemistry", a common method used to identify chemical compounds that are suitable to be used as possible drugs and capable of binding tightly to protein enzymes to activate or inhibit their effect in the cell, and were examined by mass spectroscopy.
Although normally only a few chemical reactions can be performed on a chip, the research team paved the way for testing a larger number of reactions, thus providing an innovative method for rapid sorting of healing isolates that will work most efficiently on a specific protein enzyme. In this study, the scientists prepared a chip capable of conducting 1024 chemical reactions at the same time, which in combination with other examination systems could identify possible inhibitors of the bovine carbonic anhydrase enzyme.
Thousands of cycles of complex processes, including controlled sampling, mixing from a pool of reagents and continuous washing of the microchannels in the chip - all took place inside the microchip facility and were completed in just a few hours. Currently, the research team is limited to examining the results of the experiments offline, but in the near future they plan to mechanize and computerize this aspect of the method as well.
"The expensive enzyme molecule, which is required for one chemical reaction in normal laboratory experiments, can now be split into hundreds of its "copies" in order to carry out hundreds of different reactions at the same time, thus promoting a revolution in laboratory processes, reducing the consumption of reagents and solvents and speeding up the process of identifying candidate substances that can be used as drugs, ” said the paper's author Hsian-Rong Tseng, a professor of medical and molecular pharmacology at the university.
During the development, the researchers overcame several challenges, including: reducing the amount of chemicals required to perform the reactions on the chip, increasing the sensitivity of the system and speeding up the examination of the results of the reactions.
"The state-of-the-art system allows researchers not only to test different compounds faster, but also to use only small amounts of the starting materials and reagents, a fact that results in considerable savings in costs and time spent in the laboratory," notes one of the researchers.
The research team's next steps include testing the use of the microchip technology to scan other reactions in which the chemicals and starting materials are present in limited quantities - for example, a group of protein enzymes called kinases, which play an essential part in the development of cancer.
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Liron,
What you said is always true in science. Everything Ltd.
Regarding the contemporaneity of the material - I don't know. I am not a chemist and even if the material is not the newest available - for me it is still a novelty
Ami, the question is how serious and ground-breaking this really is, I remember that for several years I was a subscriber to a popular science monthly, and in each issue there were lots and lots of news similar to this and many different articles and articles about all kinds of inventions and innovations and developments that each in itself seemed like a technological breakthrough Honestly, I don't know how many of the things that were presented in the various issues really matured into a finished product or something useful or useful.
I take everything with a limited guarantee.
Agree with 3 and 4 but love his articles. Important points of light in science. The forefront of technology and a window to an amazing world of alchemy that I would never have been exposed to if not for Dr. Nachmani
He is like a contractor, does the work and leaves 🙂
Really, it would be a good idea for you to respond and try to answer at least some of the questions being asked...
Moshe, why do you never respond to your articles? Is this keeping a distance?
Be a little more friendly, talk to us 🙂
This is another fascinating step in the acceleration we are experiencing in the development of science.
It's like connecting a rocket engine to medical discoveries.
Apparently Ray Krautzwill is right and in the end there will indeed be a doubling of
Life expectancy is an inevitable result of all the various developments.
First of all, more people will reach the age of 90+ with clarity of mind and high functional capacity.
Then the aging of the cells itself will be controlled so that you make another jump.
What a fascinating time to live in.
Sounds very, very promising. In genetic hybridization today there are chips with tens of thousands of tests on them, as well - in the size of one square centimeter. I assume that the difficulty in miniaturization stems from the bottleneck, which is the size of the enzyme that reacts - which is obviously much larger than a polynucleotide of up to a few tens of bases and much less than that.
It was not written here, so I wonder how the identity was created? When the ligand binds to the enzyme, is a phosphorescent substance formed that indicates the presence of the substance (and maybe even its quantity)? Or are the enzymes genetically engineered to provide another detectable product?
Very promising. There is a great future for labs on a chip, both because the preparations for the various tests do not play a role in determining the final result and because of the significant reduction to no extent of the cost of valuable enzymatic reactions that require quantities of enzyme for detection (the word escaped me in Hebrew).
Who will give me a chip?