First Reusable Bio-Chip

First Reusable Bio-Chip. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Think scientific laboratory. Now think computer microchip. Gajus Worthington, president and chief executive officer of Fluidigm says they have been working on ways to make essentially a microchip sized laboratory that can be used for ag research. WORTHINGTON: We invented and commercialized the fluidic equivalent of a microchip. A microchip in the electronics world is a highly integrated device that took things like vacuum tubes and cables and made them really small, put them onto chips and gave people sort of enormous processing power. So we've done a similar thing but for biology. Worthington says if you visualize a typical biology lab with tubes and hoses then make it really small is what their bio-chip is. WORTHINGTON: It's chemistry. So you mix liquids together and they react and you measure things and what we did was you take all that plumbing and made it really, really tiny and so one of our chips and the instrumentation to run it is literally equivalent to an entire roomful of the sort of conventional laboratory equipment. That means faster test results and a much lower cost for those results which helps researchers. These chips have been used in a lot of genetic research. WORTHINGTON: In the last couple of years we have gotten increasingly involved in sort of agricultural biological applications where it was clear that the power of applying genetic information had real utility and that started getting involved in salmon management. Then we got into seeds. The desire there was to use genetic information in order to make sure that the producers were actually producing the product that they had hoped to. It was kind of like a test. Of course all this speed and efficiency comes at a cost and the key for Fluidigm was to make that cost very effective since up till now you would use these chips once and toss them. They have now created the first reusable bio-chip architecture. WORTHINGTON: We started thinking about if you could reuse the device then all of a sudden the cost gets much lower. As far as we know we are the first to commercialize this kind of capability but the benefits are obvious. You don't buy a calculator once and toss it in the garbage can, you use it multiple times and that's the model we're going to move to now with these biological devices. Presently in the northwest a number of the fisheries departments are using this technology in salmon management but soon will be an option for genetic analysis in vegetable and fruit seeds, livestock in addition to fishery management. More on Monday. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.