by Jim Hannah
http://phys.org/news/2013-09-bug-virus-detection-technology.html
A new flu virus makes its first appearance in the United States on a restroom doorknob at an international airport in January. Before it can be positively identified by the Centers for Disease Control, the virus spreads throughout much of the country, leaving hundreds of thousands of people sick.
Sound familiar? Indeed, we have come to expect this scenario every year and call it an outbreak, or pessimistically, the "flu season." And in spite of living in an age when the text of the entire King James Bible can be transmitted by a mobile telephone in roughly one second, there is no reliable way to directly detect the oldest of all biological threats to human life—the virus.
But there is hope. Cutting-edge technology under development by Wright State University researchers and field-deployable at public sites like airports has the potential to detect viruses within minutes, giving early warning and reducing the possibility of an outbreak.
But there is hope. Cutting-edge technology under development by Wright State University researchers and field-deployable at public sites like airports has the potential to detect viruses within minutes, giving early warning and reducing the possibility of an outbreak.
"We would be monitoring viruses in near real time," said physics professor Elliott Brown. "This technology will allow us to detect the presence of viruses like the flu before an outbreak. It will give us predictive capabilities."
The "technology" is a one-of-a-kind sensor that uses gigahertz-to-terahertz radiation to detect viruses captured in nanofluidic chips by measurement of their resonant signatures. Wright State along with Indiana University, biosensor company Redondo Optics Inc. and the University of Tennessee has won a three-year $625,000 National Science Foundation grant—with an option for an additional $130,000—to develop this new sensor technology.
Brown, Ph.D., Ohio Research Scholars Endowed Chair in Sensors Physics at Wright State, is an expert in terahertz radiation, which consists of invisible light waves in the electromagnetic spectrum higher in frequency than microwave and lower than infrared light.
The leaders of the project, which begins Oct. 1, plan to make the first experimental THz measurement of virus signatures. The team is working closely with University of Indiana theoretical chemist Peter Ortoleva, who was the first to predict these signatures using very advanced computer simulations.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-bug-virus-detection-technology.html#jCp
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