Scientists at The University of Nottingham and GSK Consumer Healthcare have developed a technique to locate bad bacteria by commandeering their normal cellular processes.
UON Professor Cameron Alexander explained the technique as “hijacking some of the metabolic machinery which bacteria use to control their environment, and using it instead to grow polymers which bind strongly to the specific bacteria that produce them.”
By then adding fluorescent labels to light up the polymers, researchers were able to detect the infection-causing bacteria using a simple mobile phone camera.
The development offers an easy way of detecting pathogenic bacteria outside the clinical setting.
Read more at Nature Materials