FEATURE Food & Beverage
New sensor uses photonics to spot killer fruit and veg
A new sensor helps food producers quickly and efficiently check their fruit and veg for pesticides and bacteria, making food safer for consumers
A
recent study shows pesticides in fruit and vegetables kill 11,000 people every year and unintentionally poison 385
million worldwide. Monitoring these foods for microscopic chemicals and harmful bacteria can take days of sending small batches off to laboratories for testing and analysis. But now, a new detector is being developed to spot minute traces of poisonous elements with photonics, giving a result within minutes. It harnesses light particles to spot the tiniest traces of pesticide or bacteria in minutes – 50 to 100 times quicker than existing technologies. Currently being developed by an EU- funded consortium, the new system will allow workers to check for pesticides and bacteria by monitoring dozens more samples of fruits and vegetables than are currently performed. From preparing a sample, to detection, the new system can deliver a result in under 30 minutes. The project, called GRACED, is currently being coordinated by CyRIC – Cyprus Research and Innovation Centre – which consists of a group of experts from across Europe. The developers took their inspiration from an existing sensor that examines water to detect microbiological and chemical contamination from pesticides. “We developed the project as a ‘hard
24 May 2022 | Automation
fork’ extension of a previous EU project we ran, called WATERSPY. In a sense, the two projects are related: bio photonics-based technology to determine contamination in specifi c matrixes – in WATERSPY it was drinking water; in GRACED it can be anything – water used for feeding the plants, or the actual fruits and vegetables themselves. The core technologies, however, are entirely diff erent,” said GRACED Project Coordinator Alessandro Giust. “With thousands of deaths worldwide,
we are in urgent need of a new, rapid- monitoring device that is accurate, highly-sensitive and cheap to make. Our team uses a very-sensitive system based on laser light to detect chemical or biological analytes. Called a plasmo- photonic bimodal multiplexing sensor, the system can spot bacteria or pesticides without having to use chemicals or dyes as a marker. Everything is done on a single chip – we are working to detect seven diff erent analytes simultaneously in under 30 minutes – including sample preparation time,” said Giust.
Interferometric sensing To produce an unequivocal bacteria or pesticide detection, the system works by looking at the ‘binding’ of the contaminant to the sensor surface, producing a new
unique signal when a harmful constituent is present. With their plasmo-photonic bimodal multiplexing sensor, the GRACED team uses one of the most sensitive detection technologies available today to check at the molecular level. The receptors on the sensor surface are specifi cally adjusted to a particular bacteria or chemical, so analytes of interest are quickly captured. Light travelling in the sensor generates a fully exposed evanescent fi eld over the sensor surface. Here, receptors can recognise the contaminants when a sample passes through. This recognition event changes the speed of the laser light and therefore the interference pattern at the output. The change is measured and determined precisely against a set of existing values to give an instant diagnosis for a contaminant expected at the picomolar to attomolar (pM–aM) range without needing amplifi cation.
Vertical and urban farming The GRACED team sees its technology being extremely useful in many applications. “Vertical or urban farms are a bit like a laboratory, where everything is conducted in controlled rooms. Controlling the water quality is very important to the success of these type farms, and if this process is automated, even better,” said Giusti. “Some urban farms are using ‘grey water’ – sink water used for irrigation – where the risk of contamination is possible. So, a solution like ours will be highly complementary to future food production.”
Concluding in 2024, the GRACED
project will conduct future trials in France, Italy and Hungary, covering diff erent types of production systems: conventional open- air farming, novel urban farming, short agroecological value chain, semi-automatic farming, and so on. The 3.5-year project received a grant of €5m from Horizon 2020 under the Research and Innovation action funding scheme.
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