Narrator: This is Science Today. A new device that can detect
and classify viruses and bacteria within 24 hours has been
developed by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory. Tom Slezak, who leads the lab's bioinformatics
group, says their Microbial Detection Array uses DNA probes to
detect the major genetic components of any viruses or bacteria
in any sample. Slezak: There's over 2,200 different viruses and
nearly 1,000 different bacteria that have been sequenced so far.
The data is available in the public databases. We perform
bioinformatics analyses on these data and we find the regions of
each of those genomes that are most unique. We picked about
380,000 of these different regions and had them printed onto
this glass slide. Now when we are presented with an unknown
sample, and it could be environmental, it could be clinical, it
could be a product; we can quickly detect which bacteria and
viruses appear to be present. Narrator: For Science Today, I'm
Larissa Branin.