Biosensor Chip Detects Listeria Bacteria in Food Sample in Two Minutes
Listeria is one of the most common food-borne pathogens in the world and the third-leading cause of death from food poisoning in the U.S. Currently, detecting listeria bacteria contamination of food requires trained technicians and processes that take several days to complete. For food processing companies that produce and ship large quantities of foodstuff daily, listeria contamination sources can be a moving target that is often missed by current technology. Dr. Carmen Gomes, a research engineer at Texas A&M University, says she has developed a biosensor chip that can detect listeria bacteria in a food sample in two to three minutes. The same technology can be developed to detect other pathogens such as E. coli. Listeria was chosen as the first target pathogen because it can survive even at freezing temperatures.
Transcript
00:00:09 so there are a couple of microorganism that pose serious risks for consumers and among them we have leria monocytogens ecoli1 15787 and salmonella uh the the two ones that I mentioned first ltia and eoli they are the most fatal ones and um so whenever there is an outbreak they tend to uh take people to hospital and sometimes uh if they are imuno compromised they can actually die
00:00:36 so if you can detect those uh microorganism as fast as we can uh and as low concentration as we can and ideally in a processing plant real time uh we can provide a much safer food uh process material so especially for fresh produce where we don't have any uh killing step that is effective enough nowadays we if we are able to detect the contamination for it actually leaves the
00:01:02 plant we are um making sure that we have a safe uh food supply so uh the case of leria for example one of the major problems is that it's a microorganism that can grow under refrigeration and that uh in itself just having the uh fresh produce for example is stored in a refrigerat refrigerator uh it allows them for to grow to uh to concentrations that are
00:01:27 actually infectious to the human being so that's why we wanted to be able to detect them as fast as we can uh real time that's what we call um and we are working right now in developing biosensors so biosensors the idea of them is to be able to detect bacteria real time and we use electrochemical approaches to do so uh and the one that we are currently developing right now is
00:01:52 that we don't need a pre-concentration step uh for the simple that we are trying to detect uh possible contamination we actually use the same for as they are and uh what we have come up with is that we have a little uh we develop those polymers they uh work as like Celia and they behave like a we are trying to mimic this Bobby squid um hawaian bulb squid uh filtration system
00:02:20 so they uh work as a capture and release so they as the material passes through those polymers they will grab the bacteria that we are interested in detecting in a much more efficient way and as they do that they change confirmation and we can actually detect using electrochemical approaches so uh we are working on developing that and particularly we are focusing on leria
00:02:44 because of the risks that uh an outbreak with leria can C uh can affect the population