Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Infectious diseases caused by bacteria are an important health issue in Canada and the world. This makes detection of pathogenic bacteria a critical component of a health system. This importance stands out in different sectors, such as medical diagnosis (where being able to quickly identify a specific bacterial strain can save a patient's life), prevention of hospital infections, insuring the safety of food (with quick and accurate detection of food-borne bacteria in production lines, for instance) and even defense against bioterrorism. Current culture-based methods are very slow, so a fast and affordable method for the detection of small amounts of bacteria would result in large improvements in the prevention and treatment of bacteria-cause infectious diseases. The use of light trapped in micro-scale silica structures to test for the presence of specific biomolecules has been demonstrated, and we propose to expand this into detection of specific bacteria. We plan to do this by using bacteriophage viruses (viruses which attack one specific strain of bacteria by attaching to them) immobilized on the surface of these micro-scale structures. Analysis of the optical properties of light transmitted through these structures will give us information about the presence or absence of a given bacteria. We will be able to do multiple strain determination using arrays of these structures, each one prepared with a different bacteriophage.