Culture Age on Evaluation of Electrically Active Magnetic Nanoparticles as Accurate and Efficient Microbial Extraction Tools

Abstract

A potential confounding factor in the development and evaluation of biosensors is the diverse nature of the disciplines involved. Biosensor technology involves electrochemistry, microbiology, chemical synthesis, and engineering, among many other disciplines. Biological systems, due to non-homogeneous distribution, are already imprecise compared with other systems, especially food based systems. Inadequate knowledge of the techniques to moderate this leads to ineffective evaluation strategies and potentially halting the pursuit of excellent technology that was merely poorly evaluated. This research was undertaken to evaluate the effect culture age had on the capture efficiency of the electrically active magnetic nanoparticles (EAMNP) using culture as the evaluation tool. The age of culture used for immunomagnetic separation (IMS) over all the experiments was 6 to 18 hours. Ideal culture age range for evaluating biosensors is 4 to 10 hours according to the growth curve for E. coli O157: H7 in trypticase soy broth. This is supported by the statistically significant difference among organisms in groups from 3 to 10 hours old compared with those grouped from 11 to 18 and >19 hours old (α = 0.05, p = 0.001 and p = 0.014 respectively). The two older categories were not different from each other. The capture efficiency in all biosensor analysis will vary less than when culture of only viable cells is the diagnostic tool. This allows a true evaluation of the consistency and accuracy of the method, less hindered by the variation in the ability to culture the organism.