SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, March 4. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Cabildo de Tenerife has awarded a direct grant of half a million euros to the Institute of Tropical Diseases and Public Health of the Canary Islands of the University of La Laguna for the acquisition of scientific-technical equipment aimed at improving epidemiological surveillance and control in the Island.
The island’s director of Innovation, Aránzazu Artal, visited the university center’s facilities this Friday to learn about the applications of these instruments and spoke with its director, the researcher Jacob Lorenzo-Morales, accompanied by the center’s secretary, Javier Borges, and of the vice-rector for Research and Transfer, Ernesto Pereda.
The grant has been allocated to the purchase of four instruments of great importance for the research center, the ULL details in a note.
The first is a FilmArray device, Torch model, which allows the detection of up to 23 different pathogens simultaneously in any type of sample, a verification that is carried out in 45 minutes.
This material is already operational for researchers at the University of La Laguna, although it is also available to the Canary Islands Health Service (SCS), since the institute is a center authorized by the SCS to carry out this type of test.
Tropical Diseases already had a module of this instrument, to which now, with the grant awarded, three more have been added.
Other equipment acquired has been a four-capillary sequencer for the identification of Covid-19 variants, which provides easy handling of the sample and integrates all the elements as a whole, whereas previously each reagent had to be incorporated separately.
In this case, explains Lorenzo-Morales, each cartridge allows up to a thousand samples to be sequenced for approximately one hour.
Specifically, it is a device for gene expression that will make it possible to analyze coronavirus variants or samples of cell aging.
The third instrument acquired is a liquid chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer to determine contaminants in food matrices and the purchase of an automatic extractor of nucleic acids and proteins for soil samples and very rigid tissues that have low performance. if analyzed with other procedures.
