Friday, May 20, 2011

Replacing the Blue Bloods

Replacing the Blue Bloods
Thu, 19 May 2011 15:39:00 -0500

Photo of a horseshoe crab.

The Food and Drug Administration requires every drug they certify to be tested for certain poisons that damage patient health. The current gold standard for this is the limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL) assay that involves using the blood of horseshoe crabs, which strangely enough is blue, to test for endotoxin, a substance commonly associated with many symptoms caused by bacterial infections.

But researchers at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of ...

More at http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=119584&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click


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