Tiny Transparent Patch Detects Food Contamination

Engineers and biochemists at McMaster University  have developed a transparent test patch, printed with harmless molecules, that can signal contamination as it happens. The patch can be incorporated directly into food packaging, where it can monitor the contents for harmful pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella.

Transcript

00:00:01 Food contamination is a major issue. Worldwide, about 600M illnesses happen due to food poisoning. Most of the food contamination happens during the packaging and transportation. If I want to find out if there's any bacteria present in this packaged food, I need to open the package, take it out, take it to a lab and then process it. The idea that we started with was: if we can have a sensing layer inside the food packaging, then you can - by looking at it or by scanning the food package - you can know if the food is contaminated or not. This is a sample of our sensor. It's very flexible, very thin.

00:00:53 On one side it can have our sensors, and it can be installed on the food package. So we use an inkjet printer, an automated inkjet printer, to print picoliter-sized droplets of this DNA molecule onto the surface. When the bacteria are present, if you put it into the packaging, you can actually see the presence of those dots. They shine up, compared to the samples that do not have the bacteria present in them. And then you can detect the presence of the target bacterium. I think that everybody wants to know if the food that they're about to eat is safe. It's not contaminated. But also, from a supermarket management point of view, it will be ideal for the supermarkets

00:01:40 to have a simple way to determine if the stocks of food that they have for sale are safe for the consumer.