Handheld pathogen sensor detects bugs in food, environment

When there’s an outbreak of foodborne illness, health inspectors are on the case looking for clues that lead to the tiny culprit making people sick.

But instead of sending samples to an off-site lab, inspectors could soon hold the answers in the palm of their hands.

Michigan researchers came up with a quick, easy and cheap way to test for toxins and germs using nanotechnology, the study of things on a molecular scale.

“It’s a chemical, electrical way of telling the presence of something you’re looking for in a very quick manner,” said Fred Beyerlein, CEO of NanoRETE, the company developing the technology.

If contaminated spinach is the suspect, an inspector would put a spinach leaf in a bag of clean water, swish it around until particles wash off the leaf, then test the water for germs. The sensor picks up on changes in the electrical conductivity of the water to find pathogens.

But it wouldn’t have to be an inspector running the sample. The detector is portable and easy to use, so almost anyone could test for pathogens, according to Beyerlein.

According to the NanoRETE website, the machine can run a sample in less than an hour, costs less than $10 per sample and can pick up on a single cell in a millimeter of water.

Beyerlein said the hand-held sensor could be used to test food and water for dangerous germs, or for security to detect things like anthrax. Using the sensor to find germs in the environment, like E. coli on beaches, is another possibility.

“It certainly has the potential for being a good environmental tool,” Beyerlein said.