Mac researchers aim to take mystery out of when food goes ‘bad’
When people “go bad,” there are signs. Cain got that “smiting” look in his eye.
When food goes bad, it’s much harder to tell.
Until now.
McMaster researchers have engineered a small transparent patch that can be incorporated into food packaging, and it lights up when the meat or other foodstuff in the packaging spoils.
“The patch has DNA-based sensors and if there is E. coli in the food, it (the patch) started shining,” explains Hanie Yousefi, a graduate student and research assistant in McMaster’s engineering faculty.
She is part of a three-person team also including Carlos Filipe, chemical engineer and chair of the university’s chemical engineering department, and Tohid Didar, a mechanical engineer with an expertise in biomedical engineering and “interfaces” between biology and engineering.
There is a quenched dye in the patch that becomes activated if there is contamination, said Yousefi.
The light activation and chemical signalling technology was developed by researcher Yingfu Li, a biochemist at McMaster University.
“The idea (for the engineering application of that research) comes from the approach of moving more to smart systems,” said Filipe.
“We want a fridge that gives you information about what’s inside the fridge. The same with packaged food. You want it to ‘talk’ to you.”
An account of the work the three have done in developing this research and technology is being published Friday in the research journal ACS Nano, and Filipe said that this could just be the beginning, as the pathogen detection technology could easily be mass-produced as part of food packaging.
“Once the story is out, we’ll see if there are industry partners,” said Didar. “The detection can be useful in hospitals, kitchens, restaurants, wound dressings.”
It could replace the “best before” date system and the guesswork that sometimes makes a bit of a Russian roulette of our eating decisions — spin the chamber and when you take a bite, hope for the best. With the patch the decision is risk-free.
Yousefi said that the technology could be brought right into people’s refrigerators at home, so patches could be used to test milk, meat and other foods that have been sitting for who knows how long?
The three spent much of their research establishing a way to engineer the detection technology onto a flexible transparent film or substrate so it would be stable, not create false positives and also withstand various temperature, pH and humidity conditions.
“I think we could apply these principles to diagnostic and therapeutic applications,” said Filipe.
How important is the potential? According to the World Health Organization, food-borne pathogens result in approximately 600 million illnesses and 420,000 deaths per year. About 30 per cent of those cases involve children five years old and younger.