DNA Soduku
The latest scientific discovery! DNA SUDOKU?This is Sandra Tsing Loh with The Loh Down on Science saying yes, and it's not just a way to evade boredom in the lab. "DNA Sudoku" is a new screening technique of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory geneticists. How does it work? Let's consider. . . wine. Work with me. Say you've got forty thousand identical bottles of wine. ONE contains poison. Which? Testing each bottle is MUCH too slow. Instead, take a few drops from each bottle, mix in various combinations, test the mixtures. For example, you could test a mixture with samples from bottles one through ten, then one with drops of all the odd-numbered bottles, then bottles five, ten, fifteen. . . and so on. You'd still have to test HUNDREDS of mixtures, but that's better than THOUSANDS of wines. Once you know which MIXES contain poison, you can cross-check your recipes to determine the culprit. Process of elimination... Similar to. . . Sudoku! Using that Sudoku approach, biologists can pinpoint specific genetic sequences among thousands of samples. Physicists prefer the daily jumble but, tale for another day.
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