Doctors commonly diagnose infectious diseases by checking patients' blood for evidence of proteins or genes unique to different bacteria and viruses. Soon, they may be able to look instead for pathogen-specific sugars, thanks to a glass chip developed by biologist Denong Wang at Columbia University's Genome Center. The technology could ultimately be less cumbersome than DNA-based tests and more accurate than protein-based tests for certain pathogens, allowing physicians to quickly screen for thousands of different infectious diseases at once using a small sample of blood.

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