This capability has been shown to be very useful in food and pharmaceutical safety, detection of viral and bacterial infections, and animal health, as well as many other applications.

'We signed an agreement with LLNL for the potential it offers to our existing customers and because it allows us to expand into new areas for our microarray and sequencing service business,' said Shaukat Rangwala, senior vice-president of MOgene.

The LLMDA could enable food safety professionals, law enforcement, medical professionals and others to detect within 24 hours any virus or bacteria that has been sequenced and included among the array's probes. It detects viruses and bacteria with the use of 388,000 probes that fit in a checkerboard pattern in the middle of a one-inch wide, three-inch long glass slide.

One advantage of the LLMDA is that it provides researchers with the capability of detecting pathogens over the entire range of known viruses and bacteria. Current multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques can at most offer detection from among 50 organisms in one test.