Photo by Rich Cairney
Imagine if there were a postage-stamp-sized label that cost less than a cent to make and could protect you from food poisoning.
UAlberta researchers are creating just that.
If you've never had food poisoning, you should feel fortunate. Food-borne bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria can cause gut-wrenching agony, leaving you cursing the offending food as your stomach is turned inside out until you finally, gratefully, fall asleep in a ball on the bathroom floor. The Public Health Agency of Canada estimates that four million Canadians suffer from food-borne illnesses every year.
The solution being developed by a team led by Anastasia Elias and Dominic Sauvageau, professors in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, is a pathogen-detection system built right into meat packaging - a "smart label" that changes colour when it contacts a pathogen.
When someone gets food poisoning, it can take days to track down the source. It's an arduous process to trace the source of a contaminated food along the production chain. Many more people can get sick by the time a recall is made.
The smart labels promise an instant, easy-to-read tool that indicates when food is tainted. "It turns the reaction time from days into hours," Sauvageau says.
Photo by Richard Cairney
The labels were created in a lab as the team began to mix materials they hypothesized would show the desired behaviours. "We began with basically goop, flattened it out and created a film," Sauvageau explains. "Then we started to layer functions on the film - layers that would interact to get the results we were looking for."
The reactive polymer they wanted to create came with a laundry list of must-haves: it had to be non-toxic, biocompatible, biodegradable, inexpensive to manufacture, compatible with packaging techniques, flexible and transparent.
"The system could be customized for different types of pathogens and different types of food." - Anastasia Elias
The result meets all the criteria in a two-centimetre-square label. Here's how it works: A pathogen comes in contact with the smart label, encountering a layer of biosensors - sensors that detect biological molecules such as DNA, proteins or sugars (think pregnancy tests). This changes the properties of the polymer, causing it to change colour.
The technology could be used all along the food processing cycle, from the processing plant to the grocery store, to prevent contaminated products from getting to the consumer. The team is focusing on meat products now because of the importance of the livestock industry and because the packaging is flat and contacts the meat.
The team has a patent pending in Canada and the U.S., but it's too early to say when the smart labels might be on the market.
The labels might be useful in many areas, Elias says. "The system could be customized for different types of pathogens and different types of food. It could be used in medicine and to monitor water quality as well."
Watch research team member Zach Storms explain the labels in a three-minute video.
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