Narrator:        This is Science Today. A new, faster system that can detect viruses in sample amounts one million times smaller than current commercial instruments has been developed by a team of scientists and engineers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California, Davis. Reg Beer, a research scientist at the Livermore Lab, says the goal is to detect deadly viruses and bacterial pathogens in environmental and clinical samples.

Beer:   What this technology would like to do, if you could amplify the DNA fast enough and make your determination quick enough, is that if you could actually get your specific answer at the point of care, at the time that the patient presented, and that's ultimately the goal from the public health, from the point-of-care diagnostic side of this problem is how can we make this a specific detection that a physician can use to apply the appropriate medical intervention without a loss of time, without unnecessary antibiotics being prescribed when they're not needed and basically improve the efficiency of that medical intervention.

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.