TTA Archives 2005-2012

We haven’t had a ‘lab on a chip’ item in a while, since our STD tester in November. Published in the eponymous Lab on a Chip (Royal Society of Chemistry), this latest study is of one dubbed SIMBAS–Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System. (However, Ed. Donna will need a volunteer to translate them into English for her.) “For the new SIMBAS biochip, the researchers took advantage of the laws of microscale physics to speed up processes that may take hours or days in a traditional lab” to separate blood components for analysis and find, in this case, traces of biotin (B7) at a concentration of 1 part in 40 billion. More (in understandable language) at Stone Hearth’s Health, Medical and Science Updates blog.