I'm Greg Forrest and I'm happy to talk to
you today about some of the activities in

the pursuit Biosystems laboratory where
we're talking about sensitive and

specific sensor arrays for genetic
diagnostics that's what our lab works on.

So there's a lot of reasons why are labs
interested in very high throughput genetic

instrumentation and and sensor arrays
they give very accurate repeatable and

sensitive measurements we can
systematically explore a parameter space

to discover lots of things
like limiting reagents or

chemistries we can obtain useful volumes
for example with protein purification or

look at a useful area of maybe tissue
biomarkers we can we can do D.N.A.

screening looking at mutations in
large population pools for example.

And when you can do high throughput
you can enable genetic feedback

to even control cellular processes.

So the instruments that our lab works
on are capable of making thousands

to billions of measurements
simultaneously.

We load manipulate and
measure the samples in a single

integrated instrument these
measurements are cheap and scalable.

That's what allows us to do so
many of them simultaneously.

And to disciplinary study is essential.

So the students in our lab come from
backgrounds in mechanical engineering

electrical engineering biomedical and

bioengineering we try to bring graduates
and undergraduate students together in

this into support our environment to make
this kind of instrumentation possible.

Let me tell you about a few of
the projects going on really quickly.

One is on infrared laser P.C.R.
for those who don't know P.C.R.

is a simple D.N.A. amplification
technique it's done all over the world.

We're trying to modify that process using
an infrared laser diode here showing you

a laser diode heating two little Epidaurus
tubes simultaneously and we can.

Because the volumes of
the sample are very small and

the laser wavelength this is this
If a CLI tuned to this reaction.

We can heat the sample extremely quickly
at over thirty degrees C. per second.

So we can do the entire D.N.A.
amplification reaction in just a few

minutes and there are lots of other
applications of this kind of instrument

such as detecting pathogens
in blood looking for

specific disease mutations and
very rapidly in a handheld type format.

Let me tell you about some
other work we're doing.

We've made a number of micro lens or
Rays these help with sensitive and

specific optical excitation and

detection of fluorescents we've invented
a technique called micro forging which is

depicted here which allows us to make tiny
arrays of thousands of little lenses.

Here's one.

This is as big as a thimble it's
got one hundred tiny lenses on it.

Each one is perfectly curved to help
us focus incident radiation to do

fluorescents excitation and detection.

Another project in our lab involves using
microfluidics to study thrombosis or

heart attacks.

So as blood goes through
a narrowing in a channel.

It'll experience high shear and
that triggers blood clotting.

Which is exactly what happens in the
coronary arteries during a heart attack.

So we've developed some
instruments to study this.

This is a tiny microfluidic device and
blood is flowing through

all four channels simultaneously each
channel has different dimensions so

as the blood goes through
experiences different share rates.

We can see clotting as
a function of time differently.

And this instrument has dramatically
improved the amount of volume required for

this kind of study the amount
of time required and

it's increased the number of parallel
experiments we can do as well.

And this is a collaboration with
David Kuo here at Georgia Tech.

Another thing our labs.

Had some experience doing is making
massive a race of capillaries this is

a forest of ten thousand
tiny capillaries and

there are cool things you
can do with this like.

D.N.A. up through the capillaries to look
at mutations across a huge population pool

coupled with our lens array we can
do sensitive florescence detection

on all ten thousand
capillary simultaneously.

We can also use them as neural probes.

So you take the capillary Ray and
stick it into your brain and

you can tell when the neurons are firing
and map out the neural network and

this is a collaboration with Boyd and
at MIT.

So that concludes some of the activities
in our lab as you can see it's

an interdisciplinary lab we combine
persist in manufacturing optics and

molecular biology research to
ultimately build very high

throughput genetics instruments.

And I'm happy to have anybody contact
me if you like it's just see for us at

Ga Tech the E.U. We're definitely check
out our lab website which is just P.B.S..

Ga Tech to you and
send me an e-mail if you're interested.

Thanks.