UT Talk: Take Two Assays And Call Me In The Morning

Submitted By pdillawn
Words: 709
Pages: 3

Extra Credit UT Talk: Take Two Assays and Call Me in the Morning I think it is interesting how hard it is to discern whether a woman is pregnant or not. The fact that they used to inject innocent animals such as rabbits and dogs just to see if they would die or show other symptoms when injected with a pregnant female’s urine is such a horrifying picture to me—I mean, why did we go to such great lengths to figure out if someone was pregnant when it became quite apparent they were in the time span of about 2 months? Of course, thanks to Dr. Ian Richards, the task of measuring human chorionic gonadotropin, the chemical determined by scientists to rise in levels when a woman is pregnant, has become quite simple. This point about being able to easily measure the levels of human chorionic gonadotropin in humans was a great transition into the speaker’s real topic: since we can now catch pregnancy so simply so early, why don’t we apply this process that Dr. Richards came up with to measure other chemicals, and catch other bodily ailments, per say, early as well? Because it is much more pertinent that we capture life-threatening things like drug-resistant tuberculosis early than catching pregnancy early. I was surprised to learn that the method of using assays could be applied so easily to testing for other bodily illnesses or dysfunctions, assays that could easily be used in the home instead of at the doctor’s. Things like drug-resistant tuberculosis could be tested easily in the home, but it has been a long process, the speaker tells us, to get to this point. You see, there is a complicated gene process, called strand exchange, that allows us to detect the drug-resistant TB catalyst that causes this fatal disease. The first time scientists tried to make an assay to figure out whether someone has drug-resistant TB or not was not sensitive enough at all. To detect TB, you must have an extremely sensitive assay that can detect TB in someone’s body, TB that only makes up 1 millionth of that person’s body. So the speaker and his colleagues worked extremely hard, had to go back to the drawing board about as many times as the DNA needed to differentiate in the test, to create an assay that is easily accessable, cheap, and works quickly. Through this process they met many roadblocks- first, it was very insensitive, then, it worked way too slowly (it would take up to 20 hours for their test to give results), and then, a problem they are still working on, there are many different DNA mutations that create drug-resistant TB, so there would have to be many