Thanks to our never-ending obsession with miniaturizing technology and competitions like the Tricorder X-prize, it looks like everyone’s favorite piece of Star Trek medical paraphernalia, the Tricorder, may be just around the corner. A team from the University of Queensland has developed a new micro-device that creates a simple, rapid, and inexpensive strategy for detecting DNA methylation at single CpG dinucleotide resolution.

The technology they created, Methylation Sensitive electrochemical Ligase Chain Reaction (MS-eLCR), may soon improve routine patient diagnostics on the cheap. Starting out with minute amounts of bisulfite converted DNA, the team was able to create an electrochemical assay for detecting locus-specific DNA methylation.

Here’s how the mission went down (we assume it only cost the lives of a few grad students aka “Red Shirts”):

Ligase chain reaction (LCR) was employed to recognize and amplify C<T changes, the device can then record the conversion electrochemically (eLCR).

Unlike other competing techniques, their electrochemical detection method has the potential to interrogate any CpG of interest and thus they scientists coined it Methylation Specific (MS-eLCR)

The new tech was tested out on some breast cancer lines, and the team found that MS-eLCR requires as little as 0.04pM of starting material and was sensitive to 10-15% methylation change with good reproducibility.

On top of everything else, the accuracy of MS-eLCR was much like that of current fluorescence based and next generation seq based approaches. This leaves the futuristic crew optimistic about the potential for MS-eLCR as a “low cost alternative to current technologies for DNA methylation detection of specific CpG sites.”

Set a Warp 9 course to Biosensors and Bioelectronics, February 2014 and Engage!