Advancing Food Testing with Nanotechnology

In recent years food and consumer testing has been in the news. Recalls of spinach, lettuce, toys and pet food are some examples. Contamination of consumer products can be by microbes or chemicals. The speed of testing and other advances in technology are areas of improvement, but the price of the test is the ultimate determinate for utilization. When all aspects of testing are optimized the consumer will see a tremendous leap in the ability to identify contaminated products and recalls will be issued faster.

My interest in food testing was piqued when I attended the Illinois Biotechnology Organization (iBIO) IndEx, a yearly meeting and summit, a forum for discussing advances in the field of biotechnology held in Chicago, IL.

In the session on food safety and testing, one panelist had stated the state of advancement in the area of food testing. “Food testing and safety are still in the times of Louis Pasteur.”

Realizing that advances in biomedicine can be translated to other fields of science, I asked the question, “How can advances in nanotechnology and biomedicine translate to food testing?” One example is how nanotechnology can link DNA to link to a nanoparticle – a feat that took DNA testing to a new level beyond the practice of using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This type of nanotechnology can be applied to food testing by using the complimentary DNA of microorganisms to test for their presence.

The general answer from the panel to my question was that food is a complex matrix to test for microbes with nanotechnology. The quantity of DNA analyte is very small compared to the sample size in many cases. Blood and other biological fluids afford a more facile mechanism for nanotechnology DNA testing.

Since this meeting I found a relevant article.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070722210647.htm
Microbiology Today (2007, July 26). Developing Nanotechnology To Test Food Quality.

Original article: http://www.socgenmicrobiol.org.uk/pubs/micro_today/pdf/080703.pdf

This article describes new advances in food testing based on nanotechnology, where a cantilever is coated with antibodies specific for microbes. The arm on the cantilever is capable of sensing a 1 nm deflection.

This advance is very innovative:

“The lid device could be included in food packaging since it requires no external energy and is cheap to make. When a food is infected, the control unit in the plastic wrapping becomes coloured. Thus a simple colour indicator can show the quality of the food.”