Using a pair of tweezers, a UT graduate student carefully lifted a nylon mesh square about the size of a thumbnail out of a small flask in his team’s lab.
The nylon had been soaking in a clear, watery solution containing a chemical compound — the “capture agent” — that it would bind with during a process tweaked by the student and his team.
Jennifer Brodbelt, a chemistry and biochemistry professor, received a $734,068 grant from the National Institutes of Health Oct. 1 to further develop the process — Desorption Electrospray Ionization (TM-DESI) — and perfect the nylon squares which isolate desired compounds from solutions.
Brodbelt, UT graduate students and two professors from Southwestern University in Georgetown were given a two-year deadline to gather blood from people of varying ages and levels of health, and to develop a more efficient method of analyzing the samples.
Results will be used to spot trends in the frequency of certain biological compounds, including amino acids.
A mass spectrometer, the machine Brodbelt’s team uses, can identify specific compounds in a mixture like blood. The tricky part was getting the sample to spray into the machine.
Joe Chipuk, a graduate student currently working on the project, was struck by the idea of having samples sprayed directly through a sifting material into the spectrometer.
Chipuk ran home and began collecting mesh materials to spray water through. He cut up his screen door, his wife’s tea strainer and the aerator from his kitchen faucet.
He went outside, used a hose to spray water through the mesh materials and observed the water’s exit path.
He then drafted a plan to create a mesh material soaked in a chemical that allows certain compounds to travel through but traps enough as to not let every metabolite escape.
After the unwanted materials are sorted out, the desired compounds attached to the mesh are released and analyzed by the spectrometer.
Before Chipuk’s square, the desorption process played out very much like a complicated billiards shot. The spray came down at an angle, hit the slide holding the blood sample and ricocheted off carrying the compounds through the spectrometer.
The new technique allows the compounds to be sorted and analyzed at a much faster pace than before. Chipuk said they can now analyze 50 samples in approximately eight minutes, whereas before, analyzing 50 samples would have taken more than 24 hours.
The team is focusing on improving the reliability and consistency of the mesh squares, Brodbelt said.
“The hope is that this could be a way to diagnose patterns of disease or determine a prognosis based on the pattern of metabolites,” Brodbelt said. “The sooner you have an idea that you might have cancer, or that you are on track to develop cancer, you could have screening done earlier and more frequently.”
UT professor receives grant for new process
Published: Thursday, November 5, 2009
Updated: Thursday, November 5, 2009
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