THE CHALLENGE: What’s in your fridge?
WADE HEMSWORTH AND ALLYSON ROWLEY | SEPTEMBER 13, 2018
Is your favourite cheese a few days past its “best before” date? Not sure about that leftover roast? McMaster researchers have developed a tiny patch that will let you know if your food has gone bad.
THE CHALLENGE:
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.
THE EXPERTS:
Carlos Filipe, professor and chair of chemical engineering at McMaster; Tohid Didar, assistant professor, mechanical engineering and member of the McMaster Institute for Infectious Disease Research and Hanie Yousefi ’17, Mac graduate student, research assistant, and lead author on the study.
THE GOAL:
A convenient, reliable and affordable way to test whether your food and drink are safe to eat.
THE SOLUTIONS:
McMaster mechanical and chemical engineers, working with biochemists at Mac, have collaborated to develop a tiny patch — made of flexible plastic and printed with harmless molecules — that can signal contamination. The patch can be incorporated directly into food packaging, where it can monitor the contents for harmful pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella. If a pathogen is present in the food or drink inside the package, it will trigger a signal in the packaging that can be read by a smartphone or other simple device. The test itself does not affect the contents of the package.
The researchers have named the new material “Sentinel Wrap” in tribute to the Sentinel Bioactive Paper Network, an interdisciplinary research network based at McMaster. The signalling technology for the food test was developed in the McMaster labs of biochemist Yingfu Li. “He created the key,” says Filipe, “and we have built a lock and a door to go with it.”
NEXT STEPS:
Getting the invention to market will need a commercial partner and regulatory approvals. Mass producing such a patch would be fairly cheap and simple, the researchers say, and they also expect that food manufacturers could easily incorporate this into production processes. The researchers point out that the same technology could be used in other applications — such as bandages to indicate if wounds are infected, or surgical instruments to assure they are sterile. Merchants and supermarkets would also benefit, by ensuring perishable goods are safe for their customers.
THE QUOTE:
“In the future, if you go to a store and you want to be sure the meat you’re buying is safe at any point before you use it, you’ll have a much more reliable way than the expiration date,” says lead author Hanie Yousefi.
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