Bio-chips compare

BIO-CHIPS are being use as diagnostic intruments in the near future they will be used as organ replacements or enhancements to our appeareance or intellect.

Nano Microtechnology is a steping stone to create super Advanced diminutive portable chips made of human cells. Researches are conducting experiment to make biological prototypes powered by proteins and plasmas. This action will make this devices more receptible to humans. Once this break through technology comes into place, these devices will be tailored to a specific DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) configurations and they will be able to be assimilated by humans.
Some of the applications for this chips will be to enhance brain power. The capability to enhance the brain with extra memory capacity that will be the edge advantage for future generations. This technological advance will have many practical applications and will help the eldery. Us having all that extense knowledge and being able to interact with semiobiosis interfaces with amounts of data for execution on the fly or later applications will be the answer for the disadvantage to retain, keep, or just access at will to past experiences. That will be the most rewarding and beneficial contribution to all humans.

These Memory Chips will able to store a vast amount of images or stream of video needed on a basis need, and randomly accessed. Young people will be able to maximize their brain utility capacity.

In order to move from diagnostics intruments to essential parts will need to go beyond exploring Genetics and Neurons. Neurons are the information system for cell technology.

Practical examples where biochips are being use today are:

Diagnostics of Gene therapy for medical applications.

Diagnostics and testing of Stem Cells.

Growing Neurons in microchips for biomedical applications

Diagnostics and experimentation with the building blocks of all creatures either through clonning using specific tissues for specific results will be the begginings to create a more complex systems.
These systems whith smart chips (semi bio-hardware) fuzed along with DNA information to either correct or alter any body state will be the fronter line between man and machine. Using Biochips which can perform thousands of biological chemical reactions like decoding genes are also another break through.

On the Human Genome Project Biochips played an important role helping researchers on identifiying about 80,000 genes.

Companies like Affymetrix is one of the leaders on chip manufacture. They are creating Chips for genetic diagnostics. There are many labs across the world using Microchips to expidete researches

JMAR is one of the companies designing bio-chips on the industrial market

Millions of tissues samples are being dissected for Micro experimentation.

Now we can synthesize oligos directly on support (glass "chip")
Chips. They are ~1 cm(2) in sizes and can hold up to 100,000 sequences

Harvesting one's own neurons on a chip for full memory capacity will be A breakthrough

Computer and Brains are completelly different systems despite some common operations.
Brains consist of a trillion or so neurons that act as both processor and memory.
There are a thousand trillion of synapses that connect the network of neurons. Allowing the brain to act as a single system
It will take a decade or two to come up with a computer capable to operate like the brain

To match the brain performance on a chip will be the beggining of real computing power.
The brain performs at 10 petaflops in less than 1/3 cubic foot.

The brain system is about a trillion neurons and two trillion interconnections.

One more drawback how can we simulate neuron operations if Neurons operate via analog connections while our microchip technology is digital. It will be so much difficult to emulate digitally such imense vast network

Going back to our Bio-chips there have been experiments where animals neurons were implanted into sylicon chips to mimic a four operation program (advance, left, right, back)

There also experiments where Snail neurons were used:

"We designed and fabricated a silicon chip for multiple two-way interfacing, and cultured on it pairs of neurons
From the pedal ganglia of the snail Lymnaea stagnalis up to animal's neurons scientist are harvesting neuron and fussing with machines. These neurons were joined to each other by an electrical
Synapse, and to the chip by a capacitive stimulator and a recording transistor are feedbacks. We obtained a set of neuroelectronic
Units with sequential and parallel signal transmission through the neuron-silicon interface and the synapse,
With a bidirectional interfaced neuron-pair and with a signal path from the chip through a synoptically connected
Neuron pair back to the chip"

Jenkner M, Muller B, Fromherz P.

Future hybrid neuron-semiconductor chips will consist of complex neural networks that are directly interfaced
To electronic integrated circuits.

Other experiments
Munich 21 February 2003 Researchers at Infineon Technologies have succeeded in co-operation with the Max Planck
Institute in directly connecting a newly developed biosensor chip with living nerve cells and reading electrical
Signals produced by the cells. This breakthrough technology, which Infineon calls a "Neuro-Chip", will allow scientific
Researchers are gaining new insights into the biologic function of neurons, nerve tissues, and organic neural networks.
In the field of drug development, the Neuro-Chip ultimately will enable tests of the effects of new pharmaceutical
Compounds on living neurons, contributing to greater efficiency and productivity in Neuro research will be predominant in a few decades.

V1 Chip

The Optical Imaging Group from the Weizmann Institute of Science has imaged cat visual cortex (Area 17/18) using
Voltage sensitive dye, while simultaneously recording spikes from a neuron within the patch of imaged cortex.
The movie below shows their results. Optical images of activity patterns are synchronized with spikes from a
Recorded neuron for an evoked case (the optimal stimulus is presented), and a spontaneous case (no stimulus is presented). Amazingly, the activity maps preceding a spike in both the evoked and spontaneous cases are practically identical! This suggests that the response is not solely a reflection of its afferent inputs, but also reflects the activity of a nearby population of cells

Start with the VCN neurons, since their PSTHs are well known, and do not need inhibition as some Dorsal Cochlear
Nucleus (DCN) neurons do

Biosensors

Fermentation process

Bioseparations

To develop neurons based on chemical sensors or biosensor that rely on digital electronic signals from excitable neurons or neuron like membranes linked to solid state devices is the overall goal. That is so importanto to development application of luminescence sensors: Numerous pseudomonad strains produce green yellow pigments, when subjected to low iron stress. Most of these pigments chelate Fe(lll) and in the Fe(lll)-free state fluoresce. This feature is being taken advantage of in the development of an assay/biosensor for monitoring trace iron concentrations.Immunosensors for rapid detection of salmonellae based of controlled-release polymer systems: Most Enzyme immunosorbent assay schemes utilize irreversible chemistries (tight antibody antigen binding) and therefore can not be employed to acquire continuous measurements. To circumvent the irreversibility problem, we propose to use competitive reactions involving fluorescence energy transfer between two fluorophores with overlapping emission and excitation spectrums. A controlled release polymer system willbe used for constant release of fresh immunochemicals to the sensing region. This scheme will allow us to exploit the specificity of antibodies and the high sensitivity of fluorescence measurements, in the development of a rapid salmonella sensor.Ultrafiltration membrane processes for protein fractionation: Previous mass transfer models have not been successful in predicting protein throughput for ultrafiltration processes. Several reasons have been cited in the literature and one of these is lack of knowledge of the effect of biofluid ionic strength. The main goal in this project is to develop a mathematical model that will successfully predict flux as well as protein throughput. We are developing a novel technique for quantitating the ionic strength of biofluids. This technique will be used to generate data for verifying the model. The model is expected to be useful in developing concentration polarization management strategies. The DNA chips technology showed the key role that micro and nanotechnologies can have to take up some of the great scientific challenges in the field of life sciences. As the socio economic impact of such biochips is very wide, industrial groups invest large budgets for their development (Affymetrix or Nanogen in the United States, Hitachi, Olympus, Toshiba in Japan...). The human genome being almost completely sequenced, biologists turn to the study of the functions of these genes (proteins) and to the medical applications that may derive from the knowledge of the genome (gene or cellular therapy). New generations of biochips (protein chips, cellular biochips, ...) will be imagined and developed to accompany research developments in post-genomics. Cellular biochips - i.e. biochips for single cell handling - probably appeared in Japan, in the research team of Pr Washizu from the University of Kyoto [1]. A cellular biochip was proposed for the cell fusion. Two isolated single cells being exposed to an electrical field destabilizing their cytoplasmic membrane were led to fusion. Other works have been proposed in the literature concerning cell biochips for cell sorting [2] or single cell electroporation chips [3]. However, cells biochips reported in the literature are sequential, as they isolate and manipulate single cells one by one. The originality of our research is to propose highly parallelized cell-biochips, manipulating at the same time a great number of cells (at least several thousands, up to several hundreds of thousands). One of our main research topic concerns the design and the conception of a highly parallelised cell-biochip for gene therapy purpose [4,5]. Indeed, gene therapy presents a great potential to cure diseases who affect the genes, as cancer, but its development is still limited at present by the lack of efficiency of nowadays gene transfection techniques. For this reason we have been working, since 1998, on the development of a new kind of microsystem, which purposes are 1) to examine on single isolated cells the gene transfer limitations, 2) to enhance the efficiency of gene transfection. The chip is designed in order to have the capability to arrange cells in a high density two-dimensional array, and transfer the gene by-means of a local electroporation of isolated cells. For the self-arranging of cells as an array in microchambers, several strategies can be employed and have thus been tested and compared in our laboratory: 1) using mechanical aspiration of cells by-means of micromachined micro-capillaries, 2) combining the mechanical aspiration to specific capture of the cell on the substrate using antibodies, 3) using dielectrophoretic effects of electrical fields on cells. Besides these researches on the design and realization of a biochip for the gene transfer, we also develop other cellular biochips in our laboratory. Among them we work on a neuron chip permitting the ex-vivo culture and directed growth of a neuron network [6]. This device is of high interest for our biologist colleagues who need simple ex-vivo neural architectures for a better modeling and understanding of in-vivo phenomena. We also develop in the framework of a collaboration with industrial partners, cellular biochips devoted to high throughput screening in pharmacology and toxicology. Current brain imaging technologies are constrained in several ways. fMRI’s (functional magnetic resonance imaging) have a resolution limit of about a cubic millimeter, this volume can still contain tens of thousands of neurons. PET (positron emission tomography) scans are more accurate in determining where in the brain neurons are being activated but have poor temporal resolution, while EEGs (electro-encephalogram) are more accurate in precisely timing events, they are unable to track important biochemical attributes. A biosensor array chip based on an extended 5V, 0.5 µm CMOS process has been presented which allows recording of extracellular signals from neural tissue. _ The chip provides 128 x 128 capacitive sensors with a specifically adapted surface on an area of 1 mm x 1 mm. _ Signals to be detected are of order 100 µV ... 5 mV peak-to-peak, frame rate is 2000 frames per second. _ Detection circuitry is based on a sensor-MOSFET mismatch-compensating current mode technique. _ Data of first biological measurements reveal successful operation of the chip and demonstrate that this tool is capable to provide exciting new insights in The chip holds 128 128 sensors in an area of 1 1 mm², total chip area is 5 mm 6 mm. Frame rate > 2 kHz, resolution < 50 µV. A standard CMOS process is used extended by a bio­compatible surface layer. Each sensor contains an electronic circuit with a unique self-calibration mechanism, a key technique for high-density sensor integration. The sensor's non-invasive recording method maintains the viability of the biological tissue over a long period of