Scientists use RFID chips to track biological samples

Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are used today for everything from paying for public transit to tracking livestock to stopping shoplifters. But now, researchers in the U.S. and Japan want to use them for something else: keeping track of organoids, samples of human tissue that mimic pieces of organs and are grown from stem cells. The organoids the researchers embedded with RFID chips functioned normally and withstood extreme conditions, suggesting that they could be a useful way to organize and identify the large quantities of organoids that are often needed in experimental situations. The work appeared May 31 in the journal iScience.