Faster DNA Testing

tkjtkj writes "Physorg.com is reporting that a Rochester,NY, company, 'Thermal Gradients, Inc' has produced a new method of DNA analysis that can reduce the required time from hours to minutes that the usual 'Polymerase Chain Reacion' (PCR) takes to produce the large quantity of sample DNA needed to identify the donor. This could,conceivably, make "Instant DNA Identification" a reality! Will air travel now require one to arrive at the airport 5 minutes earlier than usual, to provide a skin-swab sample before boarding the plane?"

Accuracy

[kellar]

anyone got thoughts on likely accuracy? false negs/pos's? speed vs quality? TFA looks too much like an advert to give out this sort of information. (it also uses 'leverage' as a verb.)

DNA testing on job applications

[digitaldc]

How long do you think it will be before they start testing people's DNA as part of a job application?

I can see it now....Trevor wasn't hired because his DNA showed a tendency of autosomal recessive gene disorders and another defect affecting his mitochondrial enzymes.

be skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey folks I work in this field. Be highly skeptical. Department of Homeland Security is throwing large sums of money around trying to find a biological warfare agent detector that an untrained person can use. Some interesting work has come out of the spending spree - it has also brought out an army of slick talkers with a half baked idea.

Not all that special...

[J.Y.Kelly]

This doesn't seem like as much of a breakthrough as they're claiming. PCR is basically a system where you can amplify DNA by putting it through a series of heating / cooling cycles in the presence of a thermostable enzyme which does the actual amplification. Labs already use expensive peltier heaters/coolers to make this pretty efficient.

All this company have done is make a machine which heats up and cools down faster. The basic biochemistry is still the same. For most PCR reactions the rate limiting step isn't the ramping between temperatures but rather the length of time you have to leave to let the enzyme to let it copy the DNA (normally calculated around 30secs per 1000bases - though it's probaby faster than that).

The only big win for this would be if you're amplifying very small stretches of DNA (a few tens of bases) when the temperature ramping times could be significant. Even so it's still going to be far from instantaneous.

Re:popular application

[zerocool^]

Not to mention the possibility that CSI will now become something of a reality: Now, they submit those DNA samples to the lab, and get results back in a matter of minutes, when we all know that in reality, forensic investigative DNA testing takes a week or two minimum.

And good lord, my brain doesn't function at this time of morning - my fingers just wrote "DNS" when I asked them to write "DNA".

~W

Re:Only 5 minutes??

[TheRaven64]

Since this is Slashdot, I'll give a computer-related analogy. Once upon a time, there were silicon chips which could do calculations. They did them one at a time, waiting for one to be completed before starting the next one. Then someone came up with the idea of pipelining. You would start fetching one instruction while the previous one was being decoded, and start decoding it while the previous one was executing. Next, someone came up with the idea of a superscalar design - you could have two or more of these pipelines, and as long as a pair of instructions didn't depend on each other, you could execute them at once.

You see how this fits? You take the DNA sample, let people proceed to the next phase (e.g. baggage checking). Then, you scan their passports five or more minutes later and stop them if their DNA doesn't match.

Re:When will they realize

[MrMickS]

Blatantly not-true. Not fully efficient, yes. Has to be combined with other measures, yes. May be insufficient, yes. May not be worth the price, yes. Does nothing, no

DNA just allows confirmation of identity. If the people committing the terrorist acts are not under suspicion then it does nothing. It is just a matter of context.

Your comments demonstrate why its so difficult to argue against the reduction in liberty and privacy that the authorities are attempting to implement in the western world. They present everything with the "it will prevent terrorism" tagline. "No it won't" comes the view from the opposition. Someone else then says "well, that's not strictly true" and the authorities can sit back and watch it all unfold. If they are lucky they also get "its true that it won't do anything unless all of these other authoritarian measures are invoked as well". They can then respond by proposing to implement them all in the name of safety and can point out that they didn't think of it first. The fact that they had the measures ready to roll was pure coincidence, they were just being prepared and it shows that they were in touch with public feeling.

DNA testing, in itself, is no defence against terrorism which I believe was what the OP meant.

Re:What about the research benefits?

[Otter]

The summary is (typically) moronic, but these super-fast amplification schemes have been coming and going almost since PCR was invented decades ago. They never seem to be worthwhile in practice, though, so I'm skeptical about seeing huge performance gains from this one either.