Portable bacteria counter being developed

The boffins from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have teamed up to develop a new portable device which is able to keep track of just how many acid-fast staining bacteria there are in a sample, using but a dozen of bacterial organisms. This sytem is unique since it relies on magnetic nanoparticles to attach to the bacteria and a tiny MR sensor to then detect the coupled pairs. According to the MIT Technology Review, the technology works as follows.

The Harvard detector can find very small loads of bacteria. It’s a miniaturized version of a nuclear magnetic resonance imager, a very sensitive but typically large and expensive device used for clinical and chemical applications such as brain imaging and determining protein structures. The size and expense of typical nuclear magnetic resonance imagers is dictated by the need for a strong magnet. Weissleder’s group simplified the instrument into a portable, one-pound device with disposable parts by compromising on signal quality and by placing the sample chamber right inside the radio-frequency coils. “When you’re measuring bacteria, you don’t need high resolution–you just need to pick up one pattern,” says Lee.

No idea on how this is going to translate into something practical for everyday use in real life, but we look forward to our personal bacteria counter in the future.