From Caltech
Think of Legos, those popular plastic building blocks, and imagine how the little pieces click together to make nifty constructions. That's akin to what researchers say they've learned to do with pieces of proteins that the body throws off to protect itself and that prove helpful to detect to determine the presence of disease. Researchers say they're building chemical equivalents to human antibodies, substitutes that are more stable and long-lasting and that can be employed in sophisticated, new devices that can run many, many tests with just a drop of blood. Their "integrated bar code-blood chip," which is about the size of microscope slide, separates and analyzes dozens of proteins from a pinprick's worth of blood. It was limited, though, because it used antibodies -- proteins the body uses to identify, bind to and remove particular outside compounds, bacteria and viruses. The antibodies, though, were unstable. Instead, researchers built chemical substitutes, clicking together smaller building elements from short chains of amino acids. They say they have more work to do but they hope the snap-together substitutes are so much more stable that they can be left in a car trunk in August in Pasadena and still work when tested a year later.
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