Governments perform sanitary checks at different points of the food production chain to reduce the risks of foodborne illnesses. The reference method to detect food pathogens is culture, which verifies pathogens’ presence by testing their ability to grow under optimal conditions. However, this method is laborious and slow (it can take a week for bacteria and longer for fungi) as it requires sampling at the production site, shipping samples to the laboratory, and analyzing them using specialized equipment and trained personnel.
To address these limitations, Associate Professor Tohid Didar and colleagues from McMaster University in Canada joined their efforts. They designed a smart device, which they named lab-in-a-package, that can sense dangerous levels of bacteria quickly and without even opening the package.
In this work, they designed a sensor specific for Salmonella Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium), a species of Salmonella most commonly associated with chicken and other poultry products. With lab-in-a-package, the team successfully detected S. Typhimurium in contaminated chicken on site, with high sensitivity and specificity, and in real-time.
FoodWorld 