Virus laser system boosts biological monitoring

Dr John Hales, Prof Paul Dalby and Prof John Ward at UCL Biochemical Engineering have published an article in Nature Communications titled “Virus lasers for biological detection” describing a novel analytical technology which promises to open up new avenues for monitoring biology. When manufacturing a drug using biology it is necessary to constantly test to ensure that the cells are making the medicine correctly. Elsewhere we need to diagnose illnesses and monitor how much and what kind of bacteria or virus is in someone’s blood. One of the most widely used approaches to test this is to attach dyes to the cells and then use complex technology to see how much light is absorbed or re-emitted by the dye. The drawbacks of this approach are that it is slow to provide results, expensive and not accurate enough to meet scientific needs. Virus-laser detection uses synthetic biology to design a modified virus that...