CNS Food Scientists Invent Smartphone-based Bacteria Detection Technology
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A smartphone-based technology that can detect bacteria contamination, developed by food scientists in the College of Natural Sciences (CNS), sets a new benchmark in efforts to quickly and reliably understand how clean a surface is in places such as food processing plants, hospitals, gyms, and other public environments.
The technology, called BactiSee, is based on well over a decade of research and has been spun off into a company called HertZ Innovation, Inc. The company is seeking to bring BactiSee to market to help meet the need for controlling the transmission of bacterial risks.
“BactiSee looks like a COVID test crossed with a smartphone,” says Yuzhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in CNS's Department of Food Science, whose work helped transform the research conducted with her advisor and now business partner, Lili He, professor and head of the Food Science department, into a marketable technology.
Currently, the most reliable way to measure bacterial contamination on surfaces is through swab-and-culture testing in a laboratory—a process that can take one to two days, making it impractical for routine, on-site decision-making.
A faster alternative, ATP monitoring, can deliver results in seconds. However, it measures overall organic residue rather than bacteria specifically, which can lead to inconsistent or misleading assessments of cleanliness.
“BactiSee provides a direct and reliable measurement of bacterial contamination, with results available in about five minutes,” Zhang explains. “This rapid, on-site microbial risk check gives users greater confidence in surface cleanliness, supports more effective sanitization decisions and helps reduce preventable cross-contamination.”
The heart of the technology is a chemical coating that one of He’s lab members accidentally discovered. “We were awarded a research grant to develop a complex system that would allow us to detect bacteria,” explains He, “and the coating was supposed to be just one step in the process.” But the student discovered that the coating itself allowed the researchers to see the single bacterial cells without all the other complicated intervening steps. The coating also enables bacterial-specific capture, which minimizes interference from food residues and sanitizers that plagues the ATP method. The technology is protected by multiple patents, with additional intellectual property and trademark protection secured for BactiSee.
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This story was originally published by the UMass News Office.