Letter regarding Campus Sustainability Task Force report

The following email was sent today to the MIT community by Provost Martin Schmidt and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz.

To the members of the MIT community,

Two years ago we convened the Campus Sustainability Task Force (CSTF), charged to shape a vision and plan of action for campus sustainability at MIT. The CSTF has now drafted its report, Pathway to Sustainability Leadership by MIT, which reflects input from students, faculty, staff, and alumni since the CSTF launch in 2015. In releasing the preliminary report, we are opening a comment period through November, during which we are actively seeking feedback from across the MIT community.

We invite you to attend a campus-wide forum to discuss the report on Tuesday, October 17, 12:00 pm–1:30 pm in the Millikan Room (E53-482). Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP if you would like to attend.

We encourage you to read the report, which lays out the five key elements of the pathway to sustainability leadership. It is important for all voices to be heard as Institute leadership considers the task force’s recommendations. We and task force co-chairs Andrea Campbell and Julie Newman are eager to hear your thoughts, and hope you will attend the open forum. You may also send comments to sustainablemit@mit.edu.

Sincerely,

Marty Schmidt
Provost

Israel Ruiz
Executive Vice President and Treasurer

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2xIGK1Y

John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum

In the 12 years since John Durant took the helm at the MIT Museum, he has opened up the ground floor to gain street-level visibility, launched the Cambridge Science Festival, and grown attendance from around 50,000 to nearly 150,000 visitors a year.

Now, as he makes plans for a new, purpose-built museum in MIT's burgeoning gateway location in Kendall Square, Durant says he is looking forward to offering the public deeper insights into the research under way at MIT.

"This is the big opportunity for the MIT Museum to be something like what MIT and the public deserve," says Durant, who is both the Mark R. Epstein Director of the MIT Museum and a member of the faculty in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). “In our new location, we can anchor and mediate MIT's relationship with the wider community.”

Engaging with the public is more critical than ever today, Durant says, because the value of science and of evidence-based reasoning has been called into question by some segments of society. “We have suddenly plunged into a situation — briefly, I hope — where it's fashionable in some groups to believe that facts can be as you'd like them to be,” he says.

Yet, understanding science is necessary to make informed decisions on issues both private and public — from individual health care to national defense, says Durant, who received his PhD in the history and philosophy of science. “There are a multitude of ways in which science is relevant to our daily lives whether people know it or not,” he says. “Much of public policy has scientific aspects and dimensions.”

The human world at the core of MIT's mission

Durant's faculty home is in the SHASS-based Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), whose humanities and social science researchers explore science, technology, and medicine to understand the human challenges at the core of MIT's mission. STS is one of several programs that make SHASS the hub of the Institute’s major initiatives focused on furthering public engagement with science and technology. The school also trains some of the world's finest science journalists via the Graduate Program in Science Writing as well as the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship (KSJ) program. Undark Magazine, KSJ's digital offering published by KSJ Director Deborah Blum, explores ideas and endeavors at the intersection of science with political, cultural, and economic realities.

“Creative expression and the critical examination of ideas in their social and historical contexts are also essential to the work of any museum, and particularly to the work of the MIT Museum," says Durant. "This is why we are always looking for ways to incorporate the work of MIT faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. A great example is our forthcoming special exhibition, 'The Enemy."

This exhibition, opening in October, emerges from collaboration between photojournalist Ben Khelifa and Fox Harrell, an MIT faculty member with a joint appointment in Comparative Media Studies and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "'The Enemy' uses virtual reality technology to stretch visitors' senses as well as their emotional and moral imaginations," Durants says, "and we hope that it will foster more understanding in one of the places where it is most needed — in situations of human conflict.”

Wider conversations

Durant notes that the MIT Museum is also a place where visitors can get an inside look at the work that takes place at a world-class research institute. “People can understand a bit about MIT by engaging with the ideas and theories that MIT folks engage with,” he says, in research that ranges broadly across many fields. 

“MIT's humanistic disciplines — history, philosophy, cultural studies — and the social sciences all bring distinctive, analytic voices to bear on questions to do with science and its place in the wider society," says Durant. "They allow us to have wider conversations. They provide context, illuminating the broader implications of scientific research."

The contributions of artists, composers, and playwrights are equally important. “You get radically different conversations when you bring the sensibilities of accomplished artists to the table,” Durant observes. “If you want to understand Einstein's theory of relativity, you can take a class or read a textbook. Or, you could see a production of ‘Einstein's Dreams’ [a play based on the novel of the same name by SHASS Professor Alan Lightman]. ... This play takes you into the world of Einstein's thought experience — as only an imaginative writer can do.”

Einstein's theory of relativity can be difficult to understand, but making such material accessible to all is one of the key goals of the MIT Museum, Durant says. “We're trying to find ways to engage people in science that's legendarily hard — like quantum mechanics,” he says. “We aim to make even conceptually tough science accessible to more people.”

An experimental space

For example, this past February, the MIT Museum hosted an evening of live theater and conversation based around a current research project in quantum mechanics that is co-led by Professor David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science. Durant says he expects the museum will find even more ways to bring scientists and other MIT researchers together with the public in the Kendall Square location, where it will have 57,000+ square feet of galleries, classrooms, and state-of-the-art program and performance spaces. The new museum is expected to open toward the end of 2020.

“Our new museum will be an experimental place,” says Durant, who is committed to the idea that the MIT Museum can operate along the same principles as the Institute as a whole. “We want to practice what we preach as a research university: Try new ideas, test them, and report our findings.”
 

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill

 

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2xM2x9J

The Committee on Animal Care solicits feedback

The Committee on Animal Care (CAC) and the vice president for research welcome any information which would aid our efforts to assure the humane care of research animals used at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Established to ensure that MIT researchers working with animals comply with federal, state, local and institutional regulations on animal care, the CAC inspects animals, animal facilities, and laboratories, and reviews all research and teaching exercises that involve animals before experiments are performed.

If you have concerns about animal welfare, please contact the Committee on Animal Care (CAC) by calling 617-324-6892, or send your concern in writing to the CAC Office (Room 16-408), or email cacpo@mit.edu. The issue will be forwarded to the chair of the CAC and the attending veterinarian.

You may also contact any of the following:

•          Vice president for research: 617-253-3206, mtz@mit.edu

•          Director of the Division of Comparative Medicine: 617-253-1735, jgfox@mit.edu

•          CAC chair: 617-253-9436, opra@med.mit.edu

•          Attending veterinarian: 617-253-9425, mwhary@mit.edu

All concerns about animal welfare will remain confidential; the identity of individuals who contact the CAC with concerns will be treated as confidential and individuals will be protected against reprisal and discrimination consistent with MIT policies. The Committee on Animal Care will report its findings and actions to correct the issue to the vice president for research, the director of comparative medicine, the individual who reported the concern (if not reported anonymously), and oversight agencies as applicable.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2k4qELB

Celebrating the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a pioneer in melding art, science, and tech

In March 1968, on the same weekend that MIT dedicated its Center for Theoretical Physics, the Institute also inaugurated the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The juxtaposition was no coincidence. Founded by artist and MIT Professor György Kepes in 1967, CAVS was created as a fellowship program that brought cutting-edge visual artists into contact with scientists and engineers in the MIT community. The joint dedications were a declaration of MIT’s commitment to the arts, and its conviction that art and science are complementary and indispensable mission partners.

“Kepes and his colleagues, the people who founded CAVS, had lived through one or even two world wars,” says Gediminas Urbonas, director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), which was created when CAVS merged with MIT’s Visual Arts Program in 2009. “They had witnessed how a certain segment of mankind had used technology to cause destruction on an almost unimaginable scale. They believed in the arts, and in their potential to humanize those technologies so they might be used to help the human species thrive.”

This May, with the opening of an exhibition of artworks by renowned MIT alumni titled “In Our Present Condition,” the School of Architecture and Planning launched a yearlong celebration to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of CAVS. “We adhere to the idea that art has its place alongside science and technology,” says Laura Knott, a CAVS alumna who co-curated the “In Our Present Condition” show, which is on view at the Dean’s Office Gallery through April 2018. “CAVS was the first program of its kind. And while it has since sparked similar programs around the world, MIT’s leadership in the field remains unsurpassed.”

Scheduled through spring 2018, the 50th anniversary celebration will include exhibitions on campus — including at the MIT Museum — a symposium, several publications, site-specific art installations, a fall lecture series, and the Oct. 25 launch of a "Virtual Museum" that will make CAVS archival materials available to researchers and the public.

“Fifty years ago, the founders of this initiative showed remarkable conviction and foresight in its creation,” says Urbonas, an internationally-recognized artist who came to MIT in 2009. “But what is even more remarkable is how the work and ideas that their initiative produced are still relevant to our present world. We are living in the future that they imagined. And that work, which was so avant-garde that it is only now being assessed by art historians, can help us address many of the crises that have and will emerge.”

CAVS owed much of its early prominence and character to Kepes, the Hungarian-born and educated painter, designer, photographer, and educator who founded the initiative in 1967. Kepes came to MIT in 1946 after a stint as head of the Light and Color Department at the Institute of Design in Chicago, which was then known as the New Bauhaus. He served as director at CAVS until 1974. He passed away in 2001.

“György Kepes was the greatest pioneer in the marriage of art and technology in America,” playwright Alan Brody, then the associate provost for Arts at MIT, said at the time of Kepes’s death. “He was a visionary, a towering intellect, and a breathtaking artist. He single-handedly created the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and turned it into an internationally acclaimed program for the development of the finest in late 20th century art.”

To honor Kepes and his legacy, the MIT Museum will host two exhibitions of his photographs. The first, “György Kepes Photographs: From Berlin to Chicago, 1930-1946,” opens on Sept. 21 and will feature work from the artist’s time in Europe and Chicago. The second show, “The MIT Years, 1946-1974,” which will run from March 16 through Aug. 31 of 2018, concentrating on the body of work he created while at MIT. Many of the works that will be on display in both shows have never been shown in public.

A third exhibition on view at the MIT Museum, beginning in February, will present a historical overview of CAVS through selected works by research fellows, students, and faculty. Installations will be located throughout the museum and draw from a range of media and methods.   

Another anniversary project — one of the most ambitious and intriguing — is “Futurity Island,” a large-scale land-based outdoor art installation. Two years in the making and the recent recipient of an Art Works Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Futurity Island project will address vital questions about how artists function under changing climatic conditions, how cities imagine new possibilities for waterfronts, and how the making and teaching of art will adjust to the new realities of rising sea and water levels. The installation will be presented to the public in 2018.

In addition to promoting collaborations between visual artists, scientists, and engineers at MIT, CAVS encouraged its visiting fellows to experiment with emerging technologies such as laser, video, and holography, and to devise novel applications of existing technologies like steam power. Early CAVS fellows included composer Maryanne Amacher, avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, artist and educator Lowry Burgess, video artist Peter Campus, performance artist Charlotte Moorman, artist Nam June Paik, and Otto Piene, the artist who directed CAVS from 1974 to 1994.

During its first two decades, many CAVS projects examined humanity’s relationship with the planet, and its environment. The center also pursued a mandate in civic art. In 1977, the “documenta 6” exhibition in Kassel, Germany, commissioned CAVS to create Centerbeam, a massive multimedia structure that was later mounted on the National Mall in Washington.

Later, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the work shifted toward questions of geopolitics, identity, and environmental citizenship. Artists used film, sculptural and digital interventions, and installations to explore the conditions of humans living in repressive or totalitarian societies, or recovering from natural disasters. Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, the last director of CAVS, was instrumental in this shift.

Today, the heirs to CAVS broaden their legacy by engaging and testing the limits of the technologies of communication. “Art can hack and subvert technologies,” says Urbonas. “But what art ultimately does is try to understand technology, to propose new spaces in our collective imagination so we can come up with better answers and uses for it. We are pleased to be able to celebrate CAVS and its glorious past. But we are even more determined to apply what these artists have created and will create to the urgencies of our time.”

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2fRtijh

Gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger observed by LIGO and Virgo

The following news article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory, in partnership with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by MIT and Caltech, which conceived and built the project.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration report the first joint detection of gravitational waves with both the LIGO and Virgo detectors. This is the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole system and the first significant gravitational-wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector, and highlights the scientific potential of a three-detector network of gravitational-wave detectors.

The three-detector observation was made on Aug. 14 at 10:30:43 UTC. The two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Virgo detector, located near Pisa, Italy, detected a transient gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar mass black holes.

A paper about the event, known as GW170814, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The detected gravitational waves — ripples in space and time — were emitted during the final moments of the merger of two black holes with masses about 31 and 25 times the mass of the sun and located about 1.8 billion light years away. The newly produced spinning black hole has about 53 times the mass of our sun, which means that about three solar masses were converted into gravitational-wave energy during the coalescence.

“This is just the beginning of observations with the network enabled by Virgo and LIGO working together,” says David Shoemaker of MIT, who is the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “With the next observing run planned for fall 2018 we can expect such detections weekly or even more often.”

“It is wonderful to see a first gravitational-wave signal in our brand new Advanced Virgo detector only two weeks after it officially started taking data,” says Jo van den Brand of Nikhef and VU University Amsterdam, who is spokesperson for the Virgo collaboration. “That’s a great reward after all the work done in the Advanced Virgo project to upgrade the instrument over the past six years.”

“Little more than a year and a half ago, NSF announced that its Laser Gravitational-wave Observatory had made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves resulting from the collision of two black holes in a galaxy a billion light-years away," says France Córdova, NSF director. "Today, we are delighted to announce the first discovery made in partnership between the Virgo Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the first time a gravitational-wave detection was observed by these observatories, located thousands of miles apart. This is an exciting milestone in the growing international scientific effort to unlock the extraordinary mysteries of our universe.”  

Advanced LIGO is a second-generation gravitational-wave detector consisting of the two identical interferometers in Hanford and Livingston, and uses precision laser interferometry to detect gravitational waves. Beginning operation in September 2015, Advanced LIGO has conducted two observing runs. The second “O2” observing run began on Nov. 30, 2016 and ended on Aug. 25, 2017. 

Advanced Virgo is a second-generation instrument built and operated by the Virgo collaboration to search for gravitational waves. With the end of observations with the initial Virgo detector in October 2011, the integration of the Advanced Virgo detector began. The new facility was dedicated this past February, while its commissioning was ongoing. In April, the control of the detector at its nominal working point was achieved for the first time.

The Virgo detector joined the O2 run on Aug. 1, at 10:00 UTC. The real-time detection on Aug. 14 was triggered with data from all three LIGO and Virgo instruments. Virgo is, at present, less sensitive than LIGO, but two independent search algorithms based on all the information available from the three detectors demonstrated the evidence of a signal in the Virgo data as well.

Overall, the volume of universe that is likely to contain the source shrinks by more than a factor of 20 when moving from a two-detector network to a three-detector network. The sky region for GW170814 has a size of only 60 square degrees, less than one-tenth the region size with data from the two LIGO interferometers alone; in addition, the accuracy with which the source distance is measured benefits from the addition of Virgo.

“This increased precision will allow the entire astrophysical community to eventually make even more exciting discoveries, including multimessenger observations,” says Georgia Tech Professor Laura Cadonati, the deputy spokesperson for the LSC. “A smaller search area enables follow-up observations with telescopes and satellites for cosmic events that produce gravitational waves and emissions of light, such as the collision of neutron stars.”

“As we increase the number of observatories in the international gravitational wave network, we not only improve the source location, but we also recover improved polarization information that provides better information on the orientation of the orbiting objects as well as enabling new tests of Einstein’s theory,” says Fred Raab, LIGO associate director for observatory operations.

LIGO and Virgo’s partner electromagnetic facilities around the world didn’t identify a counterpart for GW170814, which was similar to the three prior LIGO observations of black hole mergers. Black holes produce gravitational waves but not light.  

“With this first joint detection by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors, we have taken one step further into the gravitational-wave cosmos,” says Caltech’s David H. Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory. “Virgo brings a powerful new capability to detect and better locate gravitational-wave sources, one that will undoubtedly lead to exciting and unanticipated results in the future.”  

LIGO is funded by NSF and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,200 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. Additional partners are listed at http://ift.tt/2ruwBDk.

The Virgo collaboration consists of more than 280 physicists and engineers belonging to 20 different European research groups: six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; eight from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; Spain with the University of Valencia; and EGO, the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2hyXfbf

“Superhero” robot wears different outfits for different tasks

From butterflies that sprout wings to hermit crabs that switch their shells, many animals must adapt their exterior features in order to survive. While humans don’t undergo that kind of metamorphosis, we often try to create functional objects that are similarly adaptive — including our robots.

Despite what you might have seen in “Transformers” movies, though, today’s robots are still pretty inflexible. Each of their parts usually has a fixed structure and a single defined purpose, making it difficult for them to perform a wide variety of actions.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to change that with a new shape-shifting robot that’s something of a superhero: It can transform itself with different “outfits” that allow it to perform different tasks.

Dubbed “Primer,” the cube-shaped robot can be controlled via magnets to make it walk, roll, sail, and glide. It carries out these actions by wearing different exoskeletons, which start out as sheets of plastic that fold into specific shapes when heated. After Primer finishes its task, it can shed its “skin” by immersing itself in water, which dissolves the exoskeleton.

“If we want robots to help us do things, it’s not very efficient to have a different one for each task,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and principal investigator on the project. “With this metamorphosis-inspired approach, we can extend the capabilities of a single robot by giving it different ‘accessories’ to use in different situations.”

Primer’s various forms have a range of advantages. For example, “Wheel-bot” has wheels that allow it to move twice as fast as “Walk-bot.” “Boat-bot” can float on water and carry nearly twice its weight. “Glider-bot” can soar across longer distances, which could be useful for deploying robots or switching environments.

Primer can even wear multiple outfits at once, like a Russian nesting doll. It can add one exoskeleton to become “Walk-bot,” and then interface with another, larger exoskeleton that allows it to carry objects and move two body lengths per second. To deploy the second exoskeleton, “Walk-bot” steps onto the sheet, which then blankets the bot with its four self-folding arms.

“Imagine future applications for space exploration, where you could send a single robot with a stack of exoskeletons to Mars,” says postdoc Shuguang Li, one of the co-authors of the study. “The robot could then perform different tasks by wearing different ‘outfits.’”

The project was led by Rus and Shuhei Miyashita, a former CSAIL postdoc who is now director of the Microrobotics Group at the University of York. Their co-authors include Li and graduate student Steven Guitron. An article about the work appears in the journal Science Robotics on Sept. 27.

Robot metamorphosis

Primer builds on several previous projects from Rus’ team, including magnetic blocks that can assemble themselves into different shapes and centimeter-long microrobots that can be precisely customized from sheets of plastic.

While robots that can change their form or function have been developed at larger sizes, it’s generally been difficult to build such structures at much smaller scales.

“This work represents an advance over the authors' previous work in that they have now demonstrated a scheme that allows for the creation of five different functionalities,” says Eric Diller, a microrobotics expert and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the paper. “Previous work at most shifted between only two functionalities, such as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ shapes.”

The team outlines many potential applications for robots that can perform multiple actions with just a quick costume change. For example, say some equipment needs to be moved across a stream. A single robot with multiple exoskeletons could potentially sail across the stream and then carry objects on the other side.

“Our approach shows that origami-inspired manufacturing allows us to have robotic components that are versatile, accessible, and reusable,” says Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Designed in a matter of hours, the exoskeletons fold into shape after being heated for just a few seconds, suggesting a new approach to rapid fabrication of robots.

“I could envision devices like these being used in ‘microfactories’ where prefabricated parts and tools would enable a single microrobot to do many complex tasks on demand,” Diller says.

As a next step, the team plans to explore giving the robots an even wider range of capabilities, from driving through water and burrowing in sand to camouflaging their color. Guitron pictures a future robotics community that shares open-source designs for parts much the way 3-D-printing enthusiasts trade ideas on sites such as Thingiverse.

“I can imagine one day being able to customize robots with different arms and appendages,” says Rus. “Why update a whole robot when you can just update one part of it?”

This project was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2k4tujp

New test rapidly diagnoses Zika

MIT researchers have developed a paper-based test that can diagnose Zika infection within 20 minutes. Unlike existing tests, the new diagnostic does not cross-react with Dengue virus, a close relative of the Zika virus that can produce false positives on many Zika tests.

This test could offer an easy-to-use, cheap, and portable diagnostic in countries where Zika and Dengue are both prevalent and the gold-standard test that measures viral RNA in the bloodstream is not available.

“It’s important to have a single test that can differentiate between the four serotypes of Dengue and Zika, because they co-circulate. They’re spread by the same mosquito,” says Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a visiting scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and a co-senior author of the paper.

The researchers worked with scientists around the world to test the new device on patient samples and confirmed that it can accurately distinguish Zika virus from related viruses.

Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is also a senior author of the study, which appears in the Sept. 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine. The paper’s first authors are IMES research scientist Irene Bosch and Department of Mechanical Engineering postdoc Helena de Puig.

No more false positives

One of the biggest challenges in diagnosing Zika is that many of the tests are based on antibodies that interact with a viral protein called NS1, which is found in the bloodstream of infected patients. Unfortunately, many other viruses from the same family, known as flaviviruses, have similar versions of NS1 and can produce a false positive. Flaviviruses include West Nile virus and the virus that causes yellow fever, as well as Dengue virus.

In an effort to create a more precise diagnostic, the MIT team set out to find antibodies that would interact exclusively with NS1 protein produced by the Zika virus, as well as antibodies specific to NS1 from each of the four different strains of the Dengue virus.

To achieve this, the researchers exposed mice to Zika and Dengue viruses and then screened the resulting antibodies, in pairs, against every flavivirus’ version of the NS1 protein. This allowed them to identify pairs of antibodies that react only with one version of NS1 and not any of the others.

“We knew by informatics analysis that if we looked enough, and we teased out the repertoire of the B cells of these animals, we would eventually find those antibodies,” Bosch says. “We were able to tease out the very few antibodies within the repertoire that would give you uniqueness in the detection.”

The researchers used these pairs to create five separate tests, one for each virus. They coated strips of paper with one antibody from each pair, while the second antibody was attached to gold nanoparticles. After adding the patient’s blood sample to a solution of these nanoparticles, the paper strip is dipped into the solution. If the target NS1 protein is present, it attaches to the antibodies on the paper strip as well as the nanoparticle-bound antibodies, and a colored spot appears on the strip within 20 minutes.

This approach requires five test strips per sample to test for each virus, but the researchers are now working on a version that would test for all five with one strip.

Most countries where Zika and Dengue are prevalent do not allow patient samples to be shipped out of the country, so the researchers traveled to several countries, including Mexico, Colombia, India, and Brazil, to test their devices with patient samples.

They found that their results were comparable to those obtained by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which detect viral RNA in the bloodstream. PCR tests are not widely used in areas where Zika virus is found because they require trained personnel and lab equipment that are not available everywhere.

“Since conventional methods require a great deal of time for sample collection and diagnostics, this inexpensive, paper-based, rapid diagnostic will be very useful for the diagnosis of many infectious diseases,” says Luke Lee, an associate president of the National University of Singapore and director of the Biomedical Institute for Global Health Research and Technology in Singapore.

Emerging viruses

Dengue infects hundreds of millions of people annually, mostly in tropical regions. It is usually not fatal, but in areas where there is more than one serotype circulating, it is more likely to produce a severe, potentially life-threatening illness. A diagnostic that can distinguish between all four serotypes of Dengue fever could give doctors a way to discover early on when a new serotype has entered their region.

“When we have traveled to the places where these viruses are problems, the people there unanimously say that they need more surveillance. They need to know which viruses are circulating in their environments,” Gehrke says.

The researchers believe that their approach should also enable them to quickly develop diagnostic tests for other related viruses that might emerge in the future.

“By already screening this group of antibodies that we have against all these antigens we have, like West Nile, we already know how well they react. So that’s information we could use in the future to develop additional tests that can be used to detect other emerging viruses,” Gehrke says.

They are now working on a diagnostic for the emerging Powassan virus, which is carried by the same tick that spreads Lyme disease. Powassan, found mainly in the northeastern United States and the Great Lakes region, causes a severe form of encephalitis.

The research was funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Science, Technology and Innovation Fund of Colombia.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2k2KYNq