West Group Paper Receives Editor's Choice

Professor Ryan West and his students recently published a paper on their research titled “Electric Field-Induced DNA Melting with Detection by Square Wave Voltammetry” in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society. The coauthors of the paper include two USF Masters students, Denny Ho and Wesley Hetrick, and two USF undergraduate researchers, Ngoc Le and Anthony Chin. The paper was well received, earning the Editor’s Choice designation from the journal, a title earned by only a small fraction of papers accepted to the journal every year.

The paper presents a novel electrochemical method for detecting mutations in DNA sequences. The group hopes that methods like the one developed in their lab may one day provide point-of-care diagnostics to enable personalized medical care quickly and at low cost. The West lab is currently extending this methodology to study DNA-drug interactions and will present this work at the 236th meeting of the Electrochemical Society in Atlanta this October.