In the news


November 2, 2023

Life and Health Sciences Summit opens new opportunities for Purdue researchers

Nearly 130 Purdue faculty, staff and university leaders met in a Life and Health Sciences Summit on Oct. 19 to explore and define opportunities to deepen Purdue’s leadership in these fields. Ahead of the summit, faculty teams from seven colleges and 22 departments submitted 48 proposals for research topics where Purdue has unique, nationally leading strengths. Funding from a pool of up to $2 million was set aside to catalyze such faculty pursuits as part of a seed investment. “We received many submissions worthy of further exploration,” said Rams Subramanian, director of Bindley Bioscience Center. “Although only a few could be presented and discussed during the summit, our strong hope is that teams continue advancing their ideas.”
October 31, 2023

Using a Food’s Unique Fingerprint to Detect Fraud

Every food has a unique, and invisible, chemical “fingerprint.” A researcher from Purdue University has discovered a quick and portable way to identify that fingerprint and sniff out food fraud on the go. Let’s say there’s a food you suspect isn’t quite as advertised. Maybe that cheese that’s supposedly been aging for five years doesn’t have the right funk or the saffron you bought doesn’t seem the right shade of red. How would you go about testing it? What would that even look like? Chemically, we have the ability to detect these differences in foods. If you send it off to an analytical chemist, they can pop the suspect food in their mass spectrometer—worth about half a million dollars and the size of a large closet—and let you know fairly precisely if there’s anything fishy with your fish. That’s not so accessible for the average shopper. Bartek Rajwa, a professor of bioinformatics at Purdue University, kept this issue in mind when he started looking at ways to detect food fraud. Was there a system that was relatively affordable? Could he make it portable? Could he find a way to have more immediate results, instead of waiting for weeks in a traditional lab test? In a word: yes. But it took him more than a few tries. “Food is obviously a very complex matrix,” says Rajwa. “If we could reproducibly register some kind of a unique pattern associated with the specific product, then, in theory, that might help [identify fraud].” Rajwa began looking for the food’s “fingerprint,” as he called it; the unique atomic makeup that would tell him definitively which slice of ham came from pork that had been cured for years in a Portuguese cave and which slice of ham was just painted to look that way.
January 31, 2023

Prostate Cancer- associated urinary proteomes differ before and ager prostatectomy: Therapeutics Advances in Medical Oncology

Dr. Yokota's group at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Indiana University Purdue University (IUPUI) and the Purdue Proteomics Facility in Bindley Bioscience Center have published their collaborative research on "Prostate Cancer-associated urinary proteome before and after prostatectomy" in the journal "Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology ". This study shows remarkable alteration of urinary proteome, and the post-prostatectomy urine provides tumor-suppressive proteomes and demonstrates the dynamic nature of urinary proteome as a strategy for predicting tumor suppressors.
January 24, 2023

Proteomic analysis of canine vaccines in: American Journal of Veterinary Research

Proteomic analysis of canine vaccines" has been published in the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) that identifies mammalian proteins in commercial veterinary vaccines against canine distemper, leptospirosi, borreliosis, and rabies. This is a result of collaboration between scientists at the Purdue Proteomics Facility in Bindley Bioscience Center and Purdue College of Veterinary Medicine.
January 14, 2023

Rapid Food Authentication Using a Portable Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy System

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is an atomic-emission spectroscopy technique that employs a focused laser beam to produce microplasma. Although LIBS was designed for applications in the field of materials science, it has lately been proposed as a method for the compositional analysis of agricultural goods. We deployed commercial handheld LIBS equipment to illustrate the performance of this promising optical technology in the context of food authentication, as the growing incidence of food fraud necessitates the development of novel portable methods for detection. We focused on regional agricultural commodities such as European Alpine-style cheeses, coffee, spices, balsamic vinegar, and vanilla extracts. Liquid examples, including seven balsamic vinegar products and six representatives of vanilla extract, were measured on a nitrocellulose membrane. No sample preparation was required for solid foods, which consisted of seven brands of coffee beans, sixteen varieties of Alpine-style cheeses, and eight different spices. The pre-processed and standardized LIBS spectra were used to train and test the elastic net-regularized multinomial classifier. The performance of the portable and benchtop LIBS systems was compared and described. The results indicate that field-deployable, portable LIBS devices provide a robust, accurate, and simple-to-use platform for agricultural product verification that requires minimal sample preparation, if any. Spectroscopy System by Purdue University Xi Wu, Sungho Shin, Carmen Gondhalekar, Valery Patsekin, and J. Paul Robinson, Basic Medical Sciences, Euiwon Bae, Mechanical Engineering and Bartek Rajwa, Research Associate in Bindley Bioscience Center
December 15, 2022

Impact of combination of short lecture and group discussion on the learning of physiology by nonmajor undergraduates

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of group discussion on the learning of mammalian physiology by nonmajor undergraduate students. Combining traditional lectures with group discussions increased the active participation of students in class and improved their learning of physiology, as measured by the results of in-semester and final examinations. The active learning technique benefited all class ranks on average. Purdue University Elikplimi K. Asem, Professor of Basic Medical Sciences and Bartek Rajwa, Research Associate Professor in Bindley Bioscience Center