Since the middle of this August, Dr. Huang Xiaowei, postdotor of Institute of Facility Agriculture Engineering, started her research work at the University of Leeds, UK. Dr. Huang plans to study on bacteria detection and identification using acoustic technology at the university for one year.
Detecting microbiological contaminations during production is a matter of primary importance in the agri-food process industry. Microbiological quality assessment is an important stage of the production chain for many agri-food products for which biological contaminations would produce a severe negative effect over consumers. Microbiological contaminations spoilage capacity usually depends on microbial competition and metabolism, and different species and amounts of bacteria occur to the specific level of spoilage. As a result, rapid quantification and discrimination speciesofmicroorganism using a portable tool is of great significance to effectively inhibit the growth of spoilage bacteria.
The current classifying and identifying bacterial strains techniques usually according to the cumbersome physiological, serological, biochemical, chemotaxonomic based on the genomic and metabolism products of the microorganisms. These methods were accuracy but destructive, time-consuming and costly. The demand to rapid and nondestructive detection and identification of bacteria is, therefore, becoming an increasingly urgent.
Since acoustic technique has been widely used to determine nanoparticle concentration and shows great advantages compared with other techniques, it may be also suitable for determination of bacteria concentration. The three-dimensional characteristic image of the bacterial colonies was obtained by microscopic ultrasonic.
(1) Development of a rapid bacteria counting method for supervising yoghourt fermentation progress using ultrasonic technique.
(2) Development of a rapid method for identifying different bacterial colonies on solid medium using ultrasonic technique.
(by Institute of Facility Agriculture Engineering)
