At present, harmful pathogens in food are mostly only discovered when people get sick. Earlier detection - preferably before food reaches consumers - could prevent many cases of foodborne illness and save the cost and effort involved in food recalls. Now, a team working toward solving this problem has developed a portable biosensor based on "nanoflowers" that detects harmful bacteria.
The new technology is the work of researchers at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, who describe how they developed and tested it in a paper published in the journal Small.
Even tiny amounts of harmful bacteria and other microbes can give rise to serious health risks, but the available sensor technology is unable to detect them easily and quickly in small quantities.
The key challenge in solving this problem is finding a way to detect the faint chemical signals that the harmful microbes emit at the molecular level.
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| The nanoflower biosensor detects tiny chemical signals emitted by bacteria and amplifies them so they can be picked up easily with a simple handheld pH meter. |
Source: medicalnewstoday
