Separating plasma from whole blood is an important step in measuring viral loads when monitoring infected patients. If you don’t have a centrifuge on hand, this continuous to be a slow process that allows for only small samples to be rapidly analyzed, and so not very useful in mobile applications and in remote environments. The other option, membranes that filter objects within certain sizes tend to clog up, so researchers at University of Pennsylvania developed a new filter mechanism that uses gravity to continuously clean the filter and allow for larger blood samples to be separated. They tested their new system using blood samples with different HIV loads and showed that the device separates out the plasma well enough for high efficiency nucleic acid amplification.
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