DNA and spaghetti

[sargentlard]

I keep hearing of these amazing new methods yet see none of them in practical use.

Nonetheless it sounds rather promising just like al lthose other unseen or unheard of promising applications.

When researchers get a sample of DNA for analysis it's often a tangled mess of coiled strands--just like that pot of spaghetti. They analyze it by chopping the strands into pieces, cloning the fragments, sequencing the pieces, sorting them according to size and, finally, fitting them back together again. In short, it's a complex and time-consuming process.

Isn't everything that involves DNA? Time consuming that is.

The DNA she's working with is from a virus that infects bacteria. "It's a very popular DNA with bioengineers," she says. "It has about 48 thousand base pairs (or 48,000 rungs in the DNA ladder). Under quiescent conditions, if it's just floating in solution, it has a size of about .7 microns. But it you were to stretch it out completely, it would be about 22 microns in length"--about 10 times longer than a typical bacterium.

DNA "biosentinels," as Muller calls them, would benefit more people than just astronauts. The devices could be used to examine anyone's genes for, say, the tendency to develop a certain illness or to react in a particular way to a medication. Medical researchers, criminologists, pharmaceutical manufacturers: they would all like to have one.

This sounds exciting yet dangerous at the same time. Privacy of one invaded at the most personal level by the mighty no?

That's in the future, though. Meanwhile, says Muller, "there's a lot of basic fundamental science that going to come out of understanding how to use flow to manipulate large molecules. There are still many challenges to making this work and a lot of interesting questions I think we're going to answer along the way."

I would like to see this comman practice before i die.