PNNL

Abstract

Haystack. Needle. Imagine having a machine into which you feed batches of hay. Each piece of hay zooms past a gadget that studies its characteristics -- golden, flexible, musty -- and identifies it as "hay". And then that odd piece hits the spotlight -- silver, shiny, pointy. "Needle." An interdisciplinary group of award-winning researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., wants to make searching for that needle in the haystack simple and fast. Their haystack is our blood or tissues. In them reside proteins that can serve as early signs of our diseases—if researchers can find the disease-related proteins among the thousands of normal ones. The team of physicists, biochemists, engineers and computer scientists is building instruments to find those signs.