BioTech Today

  ENZYME-LINKED IMMUNOSORBENT ASSAY (ELISA) ·       It is an assay to determine the presence of certain Ag or Ab in a biological assay ·       Primary Ab binds directly to the target Ag. If the primary Ab is conjugated with a reporter enzyme that may alter the specificity of the Ab. ·       Secondary Ab binds the Fc (Fraction crystallizable) region of the primary antibody. This is favored because multiple secondary Ab can bind to the Fc region of a single primary Ab. This increases the sensitivity of the assay and amplifies the results. ·       How to produce secondary Ab in-vivo? – Inject a mouse with certain Ag, and the mouse will produce Abs against that Ag (Primary Ab), now inject the Abs invoked in the mouse into a goat. The goat’s immune system will produce Abs (secondary Ab) against the primary Ab. ·       The visualization of the assay is de...

  IMMUNOPRECIPITATION & IMMUNODIFFUSION ·       Immunoprecipitation is the reaction between antibody and soluble antigen (if we had used particulate Ag , we would have said this to be an agglutination reaction) to form a soluble Ag-Ab complex lattice that eventually turns into an insoluble precipitate when the size of the lattice is greater than the critical value ·       The paratope present in Fab(Fragment Antigen Binding) of Antibody(Ab) only binds to a particular epitope on Antigen(Ag). FIGURE 1,2 ·       For a lattice to be formed an Ag is required to be bound by two Fab parts of two different Abs. [The 2 Abs can have the same epitope specificity in that case the Ag must have two same epitopes (if similar not identical, chances of cross-reactivity – game of probability), or the 2 Abs can be specific against two different epitopes of the same Ag] FIGURE 3, 4 ·     ...

 Brain cells playing video games – this may seem very Sci-Fi but that is something that has come up in the journal Neuron of the company Cortical Labs. They claim to have fabricated the first “sentient” [ In Latin ‘sentient’ means feeling] in-vitro grown ‘mini-brain’ in a Petri dish – hence they termed it DishBrain. DishBrain is an in vitro conglomeration of neural cells taken from humans and rodents which are further integrated with in silico computing across a high-density multielectrode array. By means of electrophysiological stimulation and recording, cultures are conceptualized in a simulated game world, mimicking the 1972 arcade-like game “Pong.” In response to being subjected to a stimulated niche, the cells generated electrical activity of their own manifesting it further by expending less energy as the game continued, consecutively as the ball passed a certain paddle thereby restarting the game with the ball, now at a new random point, they expended manifold measures of en...

  The confluence of the ascendancy of empiric treatment, the urge for self-medication, the reluctance of lab testing based on affordability, and the overlapping symptoms of the plethora of microbial infections have led to over-dependency on antibiotics and consecutively, their overuse. In its September 2022 article, WHO disclosed the death of 12.7 Million Worldwide due to bacterial Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) catering to the injudicious use of antibiotics. The evolution of bacterial cells to develop resistance is a natural phenomenon, however, one of the accelerating factors is the improper use of antibiotics. More alarmingly, the development of new antimicrobials is slow. The injudicious use of antibiotics is an umbrella word for the probable event of using an antibiotic even when not required, for example, taking antibiotics in case of a viral or a protozoal disease or not completing the due medicine course, this in its entirety leads to SuperBugs. Sounding fictitious tied to ...

  In recent times, the evaluation of nanoparticles and nanotubes in safe and specific drug delivery has been intense in the medical field, however, conventionally these nanoparticles are made up of carbon or gold, both of which are toxic to the human system. Nanoparticle drug delivery may seem to be a familiar term now because the covid vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna are packaged in nanoparticles, and the entire scenario has been a talked about topic. The manifold increase in efficacy of a drug when specifically administered in targeted cells is the driving point for researchers to bring out more possible ways for specific drug delivery and that is where the idea of fiction-like heroic microbots delivering drugs has emerged. Moving forward to the very intimidating recent advancements in targeted drug delivery -   As published on September 22, 2022, in Nature Materials paper, a study by Zhang, F., Zhuang, J., Li, Z. et al. at the University of California San Diego has...