FOOD SCIENCE 71
Faster and cheaper Current food safety testing often involves placing food samples in a culture dish to see if harmful bacterial colonies form, but that process takes two to three days. More rapid techniques based on bacterial DNA amplification or antibody-bacteria interactions are expensive and require special instruments.
Te MIT team hopes to adapt its new technology into arrays of small wells, each containing droplets customised to detect a different pathogen and linked to a different QR code. Tis could enable rapid, inexpensive detection of contamination using only a smartphone. “Te great advantage of our device is that you don’t need specialised instruments and technical training to do this,” Zhang says. “Tat can enable people from the factory, before shipping the food, to scan and test it to make sure it’s safe.”
Te researchers are now
working on optimising the food sample preparation so they can be placed into the wells with the droplets. Tey also plan to create droplets customised with more complex sugars that would bind to different bacterial proteins. In one paper, the researchers used a sugar that binds to a nonpathogenic type of E. coli, but they expect that they could adapt the sensor to other strains of E. coli and other harmful bacteria. “You could imagine making
really selective droplets to catch different bacteria, based on the sugar we put on them,” Savagatrup says. Te researchers are also trying
to improve the sensitivity of the sensor, which currently is similar to existing techniques but has the potential to be much greater, they believe. Tey hope to launch a company to commercialise the technology shortly. Te research was funded by the Abdul Latif Jameel World
Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT, the US Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Max-Planck Society, and the German Research Foundation.
The team hopes to adapt the technology so that it can be used to enable detection of contamination using only a smartphone
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