Policies for Reporting Test Results to Parents

What are the state and district policies on reporting test results to parents? How well do local districts follow state policies?     

A Virtual Notebook for biomedical work groups

During the past several years, Baylor College of Medicine has made a substantial commitment to the use of information technology in support of its corporate and academic programs. The concept of an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) has proved central in our planning, and the IAIMS activities that we have undertaken with funding from the National Library of Medicine have proved to be important extensions of our technology development. Here we describe our Virtual Notebook system, a conceptual and technologic framework for task coordination and information management in biomedical work groups. When fully developed and deployed, the Virtual Notebook will improve the functioning of basic and clinical research groups in the college, and it currently serves as a model for the longer-term development of our entire information management environment.     

Cyclic olefin copolymer based microfluidic devices for biochip applications: Ultraviolet surface grafting using 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine

This report studies the surface modification of cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) by 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine (MPC) monomer using photografting technique for the purpose of biointerface applications, which demonstrate resistance to both protein adsorption and cell adhesion in COC-based microfluidic devices. This is essential because the hydrophobic nature of COC can lead to adsorption of specific compounds from biological fluids in the microchannel, which can affect the results during fluidic analysis and cause clogging inside the microchannel. A correlation was found between the irradiation time and hydrophobicity of the modified substrate. Static water contact angle results show that the hydrophilicity property of the MPC-grafted substrate improves with increasing irradiation time. The contact angle of the modified surface decreased to 20 ± 5° from 88 ± 3° for the untreated substrate. The surface characterization of the modified surface was evaluated using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR spectroscopy). Attenuated total reflection-FTIR and XPS results show the presence of the phosphate group (P-O) on modified COC substrates, indicating that the hydrophilic MPC monomer has successfully grafted on COC. Finally, it was demonstrated that cell adhesion and protein adsorption on the MPC modified COC specimen has reduced significantly.     

Investigation on CO(2) laser irradiation inducing glass strip peeling for microchannel formation

The study investigates the use of CO₂ laser to induce glass strip peeling off to form microchannels on soda lime gass substrate. The strip peeling exhibits a strong dependence on the energy deposition rate on the glass surface. In spite of the vast difference in the combination of laser power and scanning speed, when the ratio of the two makes the energy deposition rate in the range 3.0-6.0 J/(cm² s), the temperature rising inside glass will be above the strain point and reach the softening region of the glass. As a result, glass strip peeling is able to occur and form microchannels with dimensions of 20-40 μm in depth and 200-280 μm in width on the glass surface. Beyond this range, higher energy depsotion rate would lead to surface melting associated with solidification cracks and lower energy deposition rate causes the generation of fragment cracks.     

DNA capture-probe based separation of double-stranded polymerase chain reaction amplification products in poly(dimethylsiloxane) microfluidic channels

Herein, we describe the development of a novel primer system that allows for the capture of double-stranded polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification products onto a microfluidic channel without any preliminary purification stages. We show that specially designed PCR primers consisting of the main primer sequence and an additional “tag sequence” linked through a poly(ethylene glycol) molecule can be used to generate ds-PCR amplification products tailed with ss-oligonucleotides of two forensically relevant genes (amelogenin and human c-fms (macrophage colony-stimulating factor) proto-oncogene for the CSF-1 receptor (CSF1PO). Furthermore, with a view to enriching and eluting the ds-PCR products of amplification on a capillary electrophoretic-based microfluidic device we describe the capture of the target ds-PCR products onto poly(dimethylsiloxane) microchannels modified with ss-oligonucleotide capture probes.