Crimson and Gold Connection; Dr. Banerjee

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection. I am Dustin Triber and today I have doctors, Banergy and Sandra. They are with Pittsburgh State University and they have done a research project over food borne illnesses, actually created a device to help find and prevent food borne illnesses. And I'm gonna have the doctors talk to us about this because honestly, they are far more educated people than I am. So doctors, please tell us what you've done and what brought this about and what you hope to do with the future on this. Yeah, this is Dr. Sandin Mukul, Central Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and KPRC, Cancer's Polymerism Center and Pittsburgh State University. And I've joined in 2013 fall in this department. This is Dr. Tuhina Banergy and I am a chemist one, same in the Department of Chemistry and I join also in the same year, 2013. So last year in November, 2015, when there were a couple of reports in the Costco salad, like there were lots of salads coming into the market and it was contaminated with this particular strain of ecoli, which is ecoli O15787. So that kind of made us thinking about this global problem,

like what if we can detect or come up with some kind of nanosensor then can detect it very fast and a rapid way of detection. So as usual, like whenever any scientist, if they are thinking about any project we dig into the literature to look around like what's available, what kind of detection modalities are already there. And when we looked into the literature, we could see that there was PCR, commonly known as polymerase chain reaction and then different kind of bacterial culturing methods that were available. But all these like modalities which were present like the detection techniques, one of the major drawback is they at least need like three to four hours for detection. And sometimes if you have this bacterial infection taking place, you might not even wait for this much amount of time. You kind of need a more rapid way of detecting. So this bacteria, how it is first I would like to highlight like how it is different from the other bacteria.

So whenever we are thinking about any bacterial infection, at least you need kind of 200 CFUs when I say CFU in the terms of bacteria means the colony forming unit. So if I say 100 CFU, that means 100 bacteria is there. And if there is 1000 CFUs, so it's 1000 bacteria. That just means more bacteria. More bacteria. So this particular strain of E. coli is very notorious. So even if you have 50 or even lesser CFUs, it can cause infection and basically sometimes it might lead to that if the infection is pretty bad and it goes undetected. So we came up with this nanosensor. So in this nanosensor that we have designed it and like we collaborated with Dr. Sandra because in Pittsburgh since the time he came in to Pittsburgh State University, his expertise, his cutting edge expertise in nanotechnology like he has been designing several nanosensors and fabricating it for the detection of cancer

and several other infectious diseases. And in the past at UCF also we did collaborate for the detection of cholera. So when this outbreak was taking place, we thought how if we can come together and make a design a nanosensor that can work for this. So we have two different modalities here. One is the magnetic relaxation and because of the presence of this magnetic relaxation modality, this nanosensor can detect very low CFU amounts. Even if there is a one CFU like one colony forming unit of the bacteria, it can detect it. And also another beauty of this nanosensor is like it can discriminate between the viable versus non-vival cells. So I can elaborate a little bit more on this like for instance, even if you have the bacteria like one CFU of this particular strain, if it is alive, then your magnetic nanosensor will kind of give a signal which would be different than if the bacteria is there but if it is not alive like if it is autoclave or heat sterilized or something.

So that's how specific and sensitive our technique is. In a dead bacteria, that's not gonna be as much of a problem. It's not virulent, so it's non-pathogenic when we are talking about the dead bacteria. And another thing like this nanosensor that we have, we commonly say it as magnetofluorescent nanosensor. We came from the country India and like in US, we have far better sanitation facilities and water and everything but in some parts of India, like there is a global problem of the water contamination. So they're actually the bacterial contamination is way more. So in those cases, you need some other modality like magnetic relaxation only won't work. So that's how we couple the fluorescence modality as well to detect the huge amount of infection. And Dr. Santra, your part was actually more of the actual device, correct? Yes, we have this nanotechnology, it's very sensitive. You can have a single drop of this solution. This is what we named as nanosensor.

And then if you have little bit of infection that water you are drinking or the food you are eating, so it'll be easy, just take extra of the food that you are eating or one drop of the liquid that you are drinking and mix with the nanosensor that we developed in our lab. And then it makes them within one minute. You will come to know whether the food you are taking or the liquid you are drinking is having any kind of bacterial or viral infection or not. Our development, our discovery is so sensitive. That within a minute you will come to know that whether the thing that you are having is contaminated or not. So our next step will be to fabricate this technology to a chip formation. You can insert the chip in the smartphone or you can have it in a scanner form. So you go to the restaurant, have your iPhone ready, just scan the food and the iPhone will give you and that is there any major contamination that could harm your body or not. So you never have to worry about getting food sickness

from going to a restaurant anymore? Yeah, that is our target. That is our target. And there are many other faculty members, researchers in this world they are working. But our as Dr. Bener G. Manson, that our is multi-model. So you cannot miss any signal that if you have only one kind of small CFU, like one CFU, it would be very early stage contamination if you have steel you can detect. Or if you have very later stage, you know, late stage contaminants still you can detect this. So our nanotechnology, our technology that we have developed at Pitt State is very robust and could be helpful for the human health in future. And hopefully this will be, I mean, this is something that could save a lot of lives in the future, not only just in our world, but obviously in the places that don't have this type of detection at all or maybe just again, you talked about they don't have the cleaning processes to have clean food and everything. They can at least check and make sure, oh, wow, we cannot eat this. So that's going to be a, you're going to save a lot of lives. Yes. These technologies will be, you know, if we are successful and now we hope it'll be globalized.

And then we are very thankful to the Pitt State, you know, Pittsburgh State University and then administrator that do, they have, you know, give this opportunity and all the facilities that they have provided for this research. So we are very thankful to them too. So Dr. Bener G. and Sandra, thank you so much for coming and talking to us on the Crimson and Gold connection. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.