Detection of bacteria in the drinkable tape water should be very useful for health and safety concerns, which needs a fast response sensor. It will be highly appreciated if some experts in the bacteria detection field could highlight the present status of such bacteria sensors and bacteria identification.
I did some work on this topic during my postdoc at Stanford. The principle we used is to press bacteria in a prepolymer. When the polymer hardens functional groups within the polymer will self assemble around the bacterium. When the bacterium is removed cavities remain which resemble size and shape of the bacterium. Thus, the bacterium that was initially used will be preferentially incorporated. In the paper we did bacteria separation but if you want to build a sensor the principle is the same.
Here is the reference: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2012/an/c2an15927a
In this paper we did that for cyano bacteria but later work has shown that it also works for e-coli or vibrio cholerae. I hope this helps.
If you are interested about the method in general here is a review I wrote about the method:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11426-012-4544-7#page-1
and another one about its applications:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac401251j
I hope this helps.
Dear Prof R. Schirhagl,
Thank you for introducing your very interesting work. I wonder how difficult is the process you used and how much time it would take to detect the bacteria to confirm the safety of the water use? It seems very interesting technology if it can be made to work at ease. I will highly appreciate to receive your these publications related to this work. Warm regards, Brahm Pal
Dear Md Ramim Tanver Rahman,
Thank you for your interest. Look forward for your information. Warm regards, Brahm Pal
Thanks :-) to do the paper I posted earlier took me a few months (I was already a quite senior postdoc then) but I would say it is quite straight forward. This is the only paper i did about this but after i left my group did some experiments with different bacteria. You can just use the same polymer to generate the sensor surface and then adjust the viscosity until your bacteria are about 1/3 of the diameter inside the polymer when you press them in. That just requires a few tries. We read out the sensor optically but you can also use the technique with another detection method if you happen to have one available. If you need any further practical Info's you can contact me. Best Romana
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