HOW WONDERFUL ARE SCIENCES.. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE ABLE TO SHOW US THINGS WE THOUGHT WE WOULD NEVER DISCOVER!

A Spanish and American team of investigators has developed an optical sensor which is based on crystal clear structure of golden nanoparticles and it’s able to detect some infectious proteins in our body before taking the first symptoms.

This innovation would mean a great advance in the early detection of diseases such as the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), or even in future Alzheimer and Parkinson.

Actually, the key element of this new method is the supercrystal it generates. Supercrystal is able to work as a microscopic antenna which identifies pathogenic molecules.

Scientists explain through their research that the sensor they have made can detect nearly ten prions (infectious proteins with altered secondary structure) per litter of blood. So, we could say that this new discovered crystal would be able to find a needle in a haystack.
Rafael Álvarez, the main scientist of this study explains that after immersing the supercrystal they’ve made with the optical sensor in a plasma sample or centrifuged blood “the sensor, which generates extremely high electric field on crystal’s surface, produces to us in an amplified way the signal which bounces off the prions”.

Thereby, the quantity of infectious proteins which exist in blood can be observed easily.
Nevertheless, the most interesting part of this development is its application. After years of investigation and waiting it has been discovered that illnesses such as Parkinson or Alzheimer have a prion origin. So, as Álvarez points out, early diagnosis systems could be designed to these diseases long before the first symptoms were found/could be found.

Furthermore, investigators affirm that some illnesses with a prion origin, such as the BSE, can be efficiently detected nowadays.

All this work has been developed by Spanish investigators from CSIS in collaboration with American scientists. Lastly, their studies, investigations and discoveries have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) magazine.