EPA has Sophisticated 'Bot for Testing Poisons! Discover Magazine, July 2011

Original Article can be found here

By Alyssa Owens. Amidst all the gloom and doom of over 80,000 untested or poorly tested chemicals (including synthetic pesticides), legally being manufactured and sold to uninformed, unsuspecting American consumers (!), a huge ray of sunshine... Now, after 35 years of criticism for lax oversight, the EPA is adopting a new technology that promises to put some teeth into the 1976 law. In March the agency introduced a $4 million, six-ton screening robot called Tox21 that is on track to test 10,000 chemicals over the next two years for just a few hundred dollars each, says EPA biologist Bob Kavlock. To pick out potentially harmful substances, the robot first loads samples of 1,400 chemicals at 15 different concentrations onto a set of plates. Then it plunks the plates into a device that adds cells modified to glow if a chemical interacts with them. After a 24-hour incubation, the robot identifies which combinations are aglow so that researchers can perform further testing.