Just a few words to say Merry Christmas to everyone and to tell you what the new look is all about. I have been designing Wordpress templates for some time now, dealing with JAVA and JQuery, MySQL and PHP, Flash and HTML etc etc. The only one of these I seem to be at odds with is JQuery, it’s almost as if you have to be a Kung Fu master of JAVA to even attempt writing code for JQuery. Sure, they SAY it’s easier to use etc but in my opinion it is more difficult. Maybe the reason is I have been doing things one way for so long that I am entrenched in a certain way of doing things…. I don’t know. I will master it, not unlike a martial artist masters Kung Fu, hence the new tagline “Kung Fu and the art of JQuery”.

I will have real word examples of what I am doing, what version of JQuery and or said plugin for JQuery works with which versions of Wordpress etc. Unlike most sites that give a long a boring example with gobs of code that has no relevance to what you want to do, you will be able to take my code and paste it where I show you to use it and it will work. Just plain work. I won’t show you 101 ways NOT to do it, I will show you what works for me and why. If this interests you I suggest you bookmark and come back often. When Santa has come and gone I will begin.

Any takers? Feel free to comment.

Trunk out.

Flasks, beakers and hot plates may soon be a thing of the past in chemistry labs. Instead of handling a few experiments on a bench top, scientists may simply pop a microchip into a computer and instantly run thousands of chemical reactions, with results — literally shrinking the lab down to the size of a thumbnail.

A microfluidic device held in the palm of the hand.

Toward that end, UCLA researchers have developed technology to perform more than a thousand chemical reactions at once on a stamp-size, PC-controlled microchip, which could accelerate the identification of potential drug candidates for treating diseases like cancer.

Their study appears in the Aug. 21 edition of the journal Lab on a Chip and is currently available online.

A team of UCLA chemists, biologists and engineers collaborated on the technology, which is based on microfluidics — the utilization of miniaturized devices to automatically handle and channel tiny amounts of liquids and chemicals invisible to the eye. The chemical reactions were performed using in situ click chemistry, a technique often used to identify potential drug molecules that bind tightly to protein enzymes to either activate or inhibit an effect in a cell, and were analyzed using mass spectrometry.

While traditionally only a few chemical reactions could be produced on a chip, the research team pioneered a way to instigate multiple reactions, thus offering a new method to quickly screen which drug molecules may work most effectively with a targeted protein enzyme. In this study, scientists produced a chip capable of conducting 1,024 reactions simultaneously, which, in a test system, ably identified potent inhibitors to the enzyme bovine carbonic anhydrase.

Design of the second generation integrated microfluidic device.

A thousand cycles of complex processes, including controlled sampling and mixing of a library of reagents and sequential microchannel rinsing, all took place on the microchip device and were completed in just a few hours. At the moment, the UCLA team is restricted to analyzing the reaction results off-line, but in the future, they intend to automate this aspect of the work as well.

“The precious enzyme molecules required for a single in situ click reaction in a traditional lab now can be split into hundreds of duplicates for performing hundreds of reactions in parallel, thus revolutionizing the laboratory process, reducing reagent consumption and accelerating the process for identifying potential drug candidates,” said study author Hsian-Rong Tseng, a researcher at UCLA’s Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging, an associate professor molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

Kym F. Faull, director of the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Lab at UCLA, helped the team with several challenges, including reducing the amount of chemicals needed for reactions on the chip, enhancing test sensitivity and speeding up reaction analysis.

“The system allows researchers to not only test compounds quicker but uses only tiny amounts of materials, which greatly reduces lab time and costs,” said Faull, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Geffen School of Medicine.

Next steps for the team include exploring the use of this microchip technology for other screening reactions in which chemicals and material samples are in limited supply — for example, with a class of protein enzymes called kinases, which play critical roles in the malignant transformation of cancer.

According to the researchers, the technology may open up many areas for biological and medicinal study.

The study team relied on work in the UCLA labs of Michael E. Phelps, Norton Simon Professor and chair of molecular and medical pharmacology, and Clifton K.F. Shen, assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology. Key research contributors included Yanju Wang, Wei-Yu Lin and Kan Liu, who work in Tseng’s lab and intend to continue this line of research in independent careers after completing their training with Tseng.

The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.

Other authors include: Rachel J. Lin of UCLA’s Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging; Matthias Selke of the department of chemistry and biochemistry at California State University, Los Angeles; Hartmuth C. Kolb of Siemens Medical Solutions; Nangang Zhang of UCLA’s Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging and the department of physics and Center of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at China’s Wuhan University; and Xing-Zhong Zhao of the department of physics and Center of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at China’s Wuhan University.
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