In today’s technological age where smaller is better, a new cutting-edge lab at Iowa State is working to shrink scientific instruments to microscopic size.

Today’s scientific instruments are fairly large, so students in the lab are trying to build them to be pocket-size, said Marc Porter, professor of chemistry and director of the Combinatorial Discovery Initiative. It takes experts from a variety of departments, including agriculture, life sciences, chemistry and physics, to miniaturize instruments.

The W.M. Keck Laboratory for the Fabrication of Microminiaturized Analytical Instrumentation opened last year and is located in Gilman Hall.

The William M. Keck Foundation provided a $1.2 million grant used to build the lab, which was given after Porter wrote a proposal for the lab to the foundation.

The lab is a clean-room facility and is kept free of contaminants by a special ventilation system that changes the air eight to nine times a minute. Students and faculty who work in the lab must wear a special suit at all times.

The basis behind the several different projects being worked on by students in the lab are diagnostics, detection and monitoring, Porter said.

Nikola Pekas, graduate student in chemistry, uses the lab for research on projects.

Miniature instruments can be about the size of a palmtop computer and are cost-effective to produce in mass quantities, Pekas said.

They would also be likely to reduce the cost of patients’ care, as well as the cost of other applications such as environmental pollution monitoring.

“We are developing microminiaturized sensors for mostly biochemical applications, and instruments for point-of-care biomedical diagnostics,” Pekas said.

Biochemical applications include testing a sample such as water, urine, blood or even food for species such as bacteria, hormones or toxins, Pekas said. The testing is done with microfluidic chips about the size of a thumbnail that he and other students make in the lab.

The chip is then plugged into a computer and a sensor response is read.

For example, a technology to monitor prostate cancer markers in patients is being developed in the lab by Pekas and others, Pekas said. Only about a drop of blood would be needed to apply to the sensor chips.

Other projects include developing miniaturized instrumentation for the rapid detection of food borne passages such as E. coli and monitoring biological and chemical warfare agents, hopefully leading to a drastic reduction of such agents, Pekas said.

Dan Gazda, graduate student in chemistry, is working with NASA to miniaturize the instruments that help detect molecular iodine and silver ion levels in space shuttles’ water supplies.

Resupply missions to the International Space Station are limited now due to the Columbia incident, Gazda said. The ship’s water supply is therefore stored for a long period of time and recycled by condensers in the heating and cycling systems.

“[We perform] color metric tests to determine whether there is enough iodine in the water to prohibit bacterial growth,” Gazda said.

Porter said the new techniques and capabilities he and students are trying to develop and training a new generation of scientists are exciting aspects of the lab.

“We’re training students so they can go out and do these things in their jobs,” Porter said. “They’ll have these important skill sets to give them an edge in their careers.”

However, there may be some drawbacks to the breakthrough lab, Pekas said. He enjoys his research but has one issue with working in the clean room.

“It’s exciting at the beginning because it looks really exotic, but wearing the special attire for hours and hours is actually not that much fun after all,” Pekas said.