Over at The Conversation is an article on using inkjet printers to screen millions of different chemical reactions.
This covers the work done by Yifei Zhang, Jun Ge and colleagues at China's Tsinghua University to develop a fast and high throughput method of testing combinations of chemical reactions. Normally these are checked using time consuming methods involving microplates. However in this case the chemists realised that a colour printer was capable of performing much of the work they required automatically:
Their printers were loaded with a series of enzymes that, when they work together in the correct ratios, produce coloured reaction products. These were printed directly onto paper where it was immediately obvious, from the intensity of a coloured dot, which reaction mixtures worked best
Some of the near term applications are both interesting and practically useful:
Yifei and colleagues have already shown that by loading the printer cartridges with the right enzymes they can use the set up to indicate the presence of glucose in a sample. Glucose in urine is a [sic] indication of diabetes, so their printer-based chemistry already has the potential to diagnose diabetes.
According to the CDC, in the US:
Total: 29.1 million people or 9.3% of the population have diabetes.
...
Undiagnosed: 8.1 million people (27.8% of people with diabetes are undiagnosed).
The publication is in Chemical Communications and there's a shorter summary at the RSC blog.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 20 2014, @07:03AM
I hope somebody has filed a bug about the software not requiring a (admittedly silly but highly traditional) dept.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday September 20 2014, @08:33PM
Sorry, this entire process is illegal because they violated the DRM of the ink cartridges by refilling them.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday September 20 2014, @01:04PM
How do they ensure that samples next to each other won't get mixed up? and won't react with the paper?
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday September 20 2014, @03:14PM
When working with small quantities of liquids the majority of forces are dominated by capillary action. Hence, ink jet printers work, but since images are continuous they cannot leave enough space to give "perfect" coverage. Don't get me wrong, IJ printers have got VERY good, but laser printing it is not (I sprung for a home color laser!).
Filter paper is already pretty inert - it is made that way. Cellulose is particularly resilient , just look at grass blades.!!!
This is very cool , especially when you see the cost of reagents. Being able to exploit commodity technology for lab procedures is always a good thing. The general PC is used extensively for lab instruments...