Scientists at the Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland, have won £246,000 funding from Scottish Enterprise’s Proof of Concept programme, for the further development of a food testing kit that will be able to detect the presence of potentially fatal toxins within hours.
The technology will cut detection times for food poisoning bugs such as Campylobacter, Listeria and Salmonella, from six days to just five hours, and according to Brajesh Singh, who is leading the project, the technology could prevent thousands of deaths every year from food poisoning outbreaks.
“The conventional methods for detecting food contamination used by industries and regulatory agencies are labour intensive, time consuming and costly. Our proposed technology offers for the first time, at low cost, the simultaneous detection of multiple contaminants within five to eight hours.”
The technology has wider applications and will be attractive to healthcare, forensic and remediation industries also.
The test kit will detect multiple microbial contaminants in food, water and environmental samples and determine if pathogens are capable of producing toxins and/or whether they have antibiotic resistance.
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