Detecting specific strains of bacteria that cause food poisoning quickly is important to food safety. Current methods can be either time-consuming or expensive. Now, a team of electrical engineers from the United States and Turkey have developed a fast and inexpensive technology to detect and identify specific strains of bacteria like E. coli. Their study is published in Nature Nanotechnology.
The technology involves adapting a molecular electronic device called a single-molecule break junction to detect RNA from strains of E. coli that cause illness. It uses atomically fine electrodes to suspend a DNA probe that binds target RNA, according to the research. This device can detect as little as a one-base change in RNA, which is enough to not only determine that the bacteria strain was E. coli, but that it was the strain that produces Shiga toxin. “We believe that this approach can be further developed to make an electrically based sensor for diagnostic purposes,” write the researchers.
Source: IFT
