How is E.coli being Used to Detect Heavy Metals in Water?
When people think of E.coli, most of the time, only negative phrases come to mind. This isn’t surprising though, E.coli affects thousands of people in the U.S. every year, and certain serotypes can be serious or even fatal for many. But in recent, new technology, processes have been formed that use E.coli in a process that detects heavy metal within bodies of water. This is an extremely important development as scientists have now found a new way to improve water quality, and not just in the United States.
What is this new technology? According to Envirotec, “E. coli exhibits a biochemical response in the presence of metal ions, a slight change that researchers – from the University of California, Irvine – say they were able to observe with chemically assembled gold nanoparticle optical sensors.” In other words, through the machine’s built-in optical sensors, scientists are able to monitor E.coli’s biochemical responses to exposure to different metals, such as chromium and arsenic, and discover if the samples of water are contaminated at a much earlier rate. Through this quick and thorough piece of new detection technology (it only takes 10 minutes!), contaminated tap and wastewater samples can be identified much more quickly.
One part of this new technology, the usage of gold nanoparticles partnered with the “E. coli machine’s” learning algorithms, was able to enhance the sensitivity of the machine, and therefore make “metal toxins including arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead and mercury” more easily detected, this according to Technology Networks.
Co-author of a new study on this technology, which appears in Proceedings in the National Academy of Science, is a UCI professor of materials science and engineering, Regina Ragan. She corroborated the summary of findings, noting: “This transfer learning method allowed the algorithms to determine if drinking water was within U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization recommend limits for each contaminant with greater than 96-percent accuracy and with 92-percent accuracy for treated wastewater.”
These algorithms allow for this machine to quickly test “unseen tap water and wastewater” samples from third world locations and distant locations outside the United States, having the potential to improve water quality globally.
