Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
During harmful algal blooms (HAB), brevetoxins are concentrated enough to cause a combination of gastro-intestinal and neurological symptoms as well as other adverse human health effects. Neurotoxic Shellfish Poisoning is caused by consumption of shellfish contaminated with brevetoxins during HAB. Rapid and real-time methods for brevetoxin detection are necessary to protect the public health and ensure food safety. Current measurement and detection methods rely on having to take the samples from the field to the laboratory for analysis. This is often a time consuming and costly process. More importantly, the lack of real-time data hampers proper and timely decision making. The proposed handheld platform is capable of rapid and real-time detections of brevetoxins with the selectivity and sensitivity that can only be achieved today with laboratory instruments. The proposed technology will therefore greatly benefit the shellfish industry and the aquaculture industry in general. In addition to brevetoxins, the same technology has clear potential to be subsequently developed to permit the diagnostics of toxins produced by a wide range of other pathogens. In particular, the same microfluidic instrumentation could be readily adapted to monitoring other water-based toxins including additional marine HAB toxins associated with fish and shellfish contamination as well as cyanobacteria toxins.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The goal of this SBIR research project is to demonstrate the feasibility of an integrated microfluidic technology capable of rapid and real-time detections and monitoring of brevetoxins, neurotoxins produced by the dinoflagellate, Karenia brevis, in the Gulf of Mexico and other marine environment. The proposed technology is the result of the infusion of our proprietary automated on-chip microfluidic assay technology with the built-in features of smart phones in a miniaturized format. As such, it is inexpensive, easy to use and has a handheld platform. Our Phase I objective is to adapt the commercially established immunoassay protocols to our integrated microfluidic platform with a disposable microfluidic cartridge. If successful, we will be well positioned to address the needs of real-time detection of brevetoxins, and other algal biotoxins as handheld, user-friendly detectors are in great demand for protecting public health and coastal community economies. To this end, the proposed research effort will satisfy one of the five primary USDA NIFA Societal Challenge Areas: Food Safety. The proposed technology will help reduce the incidence of food-borne illnesses and death through a safe food supply and improve the ability to detect food-borne toxins and pathogens.
Project Methods
The proposed technology is the result of the infusion of our proprietary automated on-chip microfluidic assay technology with the built-in features of smart phones in a miniaturized format. In particular, we will transfer existing commercial enzyme linked immunosorbent assay protocols to the integrated microfluidic format, enabling us to develop a rapid, fully-automated immunoassay platform. As smart phones are becoming ubiquitous, they provide a robust, reconfigurable, and inexpensive platform for interfacing to the microfluidic device. By leveraging these built-in features of commercial smart phones such as wireless communication, information storage, optical imaging and signal processing, the design of the handheld device is greatly simplified and the manufacturing cost is significantly reduced. As a result, the proposed technology has a number of advantages including reducing the overall footprint, cost, and the power consumption of the device, offering more flexible information management and better overall device performance. The Phase I technical work plan includes 1) fabrication of the disposable microfluidic chip, 2) demonstrating on-chip automated assay preparation for brevetoxins, and 3) developing the instrumentation for interfacing built-in features of the smart phone to the microfluidic device. During the subsequent Phase II effort, we will build a handheld instrument with digital readout and wireless data transfer feature capable of rapid and real-time detections of brevetoxins and other water-based toxins with the selectivity and sensitivity that can only be achieved today with laboratory instruments.