Bio-Medical Detection Unit for Food Toxins and Pathogenic Viruses

Highly sensitive sensors that can detect Hep-2 virus and food toxins have been successfully developed at the institute. The range and limit of detection for Hep-B virus is found to be 10 fM-50 aM whereas for food toxins it is 1pM-0.1 fM.

The system works with Atmega128 microcontroller. The participating team claims this unit is  user friendly, light weight, portable and consumes low power, while operating with +5V d.c. supply. They have performed Impedance spectroscopy by a 50mV amplitude sinusoidal signal with frequency varying from 100Hz to 100KHz. The device has two phases of operation. First is control and another is test phase for which four push buttons are provided for phase selection. In the software part PSD is carried out and results of impedance spectroscopy and noise spectroscopy are combined with a robust algorithm to quantify the bio-molecule concentration. This work is thus expected to contribute to important health issues of the society.