A young researcher received the prize from the French Chemistry Society for his new DNA sequencing technique: it considerably reduces costs and delays.
Their work revolutionized both forensic medicine and forensic work and medical diagnostics. At the end of the 1970s, two teams of scientists, one in the United States under the direction of Walter Gilbert, the other in the United Kingdom under the direction of Frédérick Sanger, developed two different sequencing techniques. DNA. The idea of sequencing is to determine the order of nucleotides for a particular strand of DNA.
Both teams were awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980. But today, even if machines exist to rapidly sequence DNA, Sanger sequencing is still used in several laboratories. And it takes a few hours to get the results.
The discovery of a Toulouse researcher, Aurélien Bancaud, awarded by the Société Française de Chimie, could well change the situation. He has developed a method called MicroLAS. The basic principle of Sanger sequencing is electrophoresis. The method consists of depositing the DNA fragment on a gel matrix, then passing an electric current through it in order to separate the strands, which move according to their size.
No more electrophoresis
Aurélien Bancaud does without the gel matrix. It deposits the DNA on a small chip, over which it passes the electric current. The advantage is to obtain a much faster separation of the strands. In addition, the chip is much more sensitive than the gel, which avoids having to use too large DNA samples to achieve a good result.
Researchers save time since they do not have to prepare the gel or concentrate the DNA sample, as in “traditional” sequencing. In all, the method could reduce the duration of sequencing from a few hours to around ten minutes, with lower costs as a result. In criminology or in disease detection, where the speed of obtaining results is crucial, the method is of definite interest.
Aurélien Bancaud’s invention has been the subject of a patent filing, and could be developed by the company Picometrics, near Toulouse.
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