A better gold standard
Nanosphere Inc. has developed technology that can increase sensitivity and selectivity in detecting oligonucleotide binding events to DNA microarrays, while also reducing the cost of array scanning hardware.
In last week's Science, Nanosphere founders at Northwestern University published the finding that oligonucleotides labeled with gold nanoparticles were able to discriminate DNA microarray targets with single nucleotide (SNP) mismatches with 3-fold greater selectivity than oligos labeled with fluorescent probes. Also, when used with a detection technique based on nanoparticle reduction of silver (a chemical process used in photographic development) and a conventional flatbed scanner, the nanoparticle (scanometric) system had a 100-fold greater sensitivity than a fluorescent detection system...