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<p>Microbial identification is essential in biosecurity, food safety, and in the clinical environment that would be relevant to this technology might be the monitoring and preventing nosocomial infections. In general, three steps are needed to deliver correct identification of a species: sample acquisition/preparation, microbe detection, and microbe identification. Throughout the years, most effort in instrument development using optical technology has been focused on the development of a colony counter, which is essentially a simple detection device; further testing is required for identification of organisms however. To identify and classify bacterial colonies, morphological methods, which observe the morphological characteristics of the bacterial colony via visual inspection, are widely studied. </p><p>The objectives of this project are: Provide low-cost, reagent-free pathogen-identification technologies that enhance all aspects of food safety. Provide a low-cost method for monitoring microbial species in a variety of situations, and 3Develop a series of software suites that allow direct and rapid analysis of the results. In this project we will develop the technology, expand the software for advanced classifications, and build a database of know organisms that can be used to track and identify species from different locations.</p>
Foodborne pathogens cause significant economic losses across all levels of industry and society, and a number of very dangerous pathogens are deadly. Even pathogens that cause no significant stress to normal healthy individuals can result in death for individuals who are immunocompromised, very young, or elderly. Thus, maintaining the integrity of the food chain is a critical part of our well-developed agricultural system. While there are many tools and technologies available for testing foods, reagents, liquids, etc. for pathogens, many tests are time consuming and/or expensive. Some can only be performed within high-technology environments, and some cannot be adapted to all types of samples. One of the important goals of this application is to design and implement test systems that are low cost and easy to perform, and therefore provide a huge return on the investment to society at large. While the USA is a highly technological society with tremendous infrastructure, many countries cannot afford a lot of current technology. Our proposed technology will not be expensive to manufacture, and because it is reagent-free, the cost of pathogen detection is significantly reduced. Therefore we hope that in future as the technology matures and becomes available, low-cost versions will be available in resource-poor environments.