Barcodes Are Us

BY KIM BELLARD Usually I write about things where I see some unexpected parallel to healthcare, or something just amazed me, or outraged me (there are lots of things about healthcare like the latter).  But sometimes I run across something that just delights me. So when I inexplicably stumbled across DNA Barcoding Technology for High Throughput Cell-Nanoparticle Study, by Andy Tay, PhD, my first thought was, oh, nanoparticles, that’s always interesting, then it hit me: wait, DNA has barcodes?  How delightful. We’re all used to barcodes.  Pretty much every product in pretty much every store has a barcode.  The barcode was invented in the late 1940’s, but didn’t really take off in popularity until the UPC (Universal Product Code) barcode.  A Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974 was the first grocery item scanned (a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum, if you are interested).  The UPC barcode encodes the Manufacturer of the product, and the product code.   The now almost as ubiquitous QR codes are, essentially, two dimensional barcodes.  Accordingly, they can store significantly more information.   But back to DNA barcodes.  The main purpose is, as you might guess from the name, is to have a standardized way to uniquely identify species, based on their DNA (think of species as the “product”).  The methods were first proposed in 2003, by Paul D N Herbert, et alia, and quickly gained traction.   Guo, et. alia, describes D...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Tech Health Technology DNA Barcodes DNA nanotechnology Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs