| TECHNOLOGY |
in which thousands of optical microfibers are used to illuminate compounds on individual beads. Co explains that a chemical treatment is used to etch tiny femtoliter wells in the end of each fiber, and that the wells are then filled with derivatized beads. The beads can be derivatized with a variety of reagent types, such as antibodies for immunoassay applications, DNA for genomic analysis, or fluorescent reagents for detecting reaction products in screening procedures. genomics applications such as expression profiling and single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping, the company's technology "has a lot of commonality with high-throughput screening and combinatorial synthesis. "So it's no longer a leap of faith to envision this on chemists' lab benches. The possibility of integrating fiber optics with the solid-phase synthesis of small molecules could leverage this technology for a variety of processes, including reaction monitoring, product analyses, and screening in high-throughput assays. The real challenge will be the data analysis, and I don't believe anyone has solved that problem yet."
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