Barcodes get a shrinking feeling
18 Oct 2001
Barcodes are ubiquitous these days, from the supermarket to the chemical plant. But now, barcodes are being shrunk to microscopic size, and may be used in drug discovery.
Researchers from Penn State University have found a method to produce metal rods small enough to fit inside a red blood cell, which can carry barcode-type information. Christine Keating and her team make the rods using an electrochemical process to 'cast' layers of different metals inside cylindrical pores in a film of aluminium oxide. Each 6.5µm-long rod can have 13 layers.
Rods made using two metals can have 4160 possible combinations of layers, the team says, while adding another metal gives almost 800 000 combinations. This is more than the number of genes in the human genome, so a barcode could be assigned to every protein produced by a cell.
The team says that the rods could be used to track the interactions of genes when treated with drug candidates.
