TINY barcodes could offer a cheap way to tell which bugs are making you sick
by allowing doctors to screen samples of blood, saliva or urine for common
microorganisms.
The barcodes, developed in Britain by SmartBead Technologies of Cambridge,
are etched onto microscopic aluminium wafers using techniques developed by
silicon chip makers. Each wafer is also loaded with an antibody or DNA probe
that recognises and binds to a specific pathogen or DNA sequence. To tell which
wafer has captured an organism, doctors will treat them all with a mixture of
the same probes—except that they are attached to a…
