Industry pinpoints research areas for $20 million GoodFood project

By Genevieve Oger

Food scares of recent years such as madcow disease, listeria and now bird flu have led food regulators to become increasingly picky about what ends up on their citizen’s dinner tables. To ensure food risk is kept to a minimum, the European Union has funded a scientific project designed to put micro and nanotechnolgy to work in detecting toxins or pathogens in food before it gets into local kitchens.

“Many microtechnologies have been developed for home appliances, the environment and the automotive industry,” said Carles Cane, coordinator of the GoodFood Project and microtechnologist at Spain’s National Microelectronics Center. “But they haven’t been used in the agro-food industry very much and there are quite a few medical applications that can be adapted to address things like food safety and food quality.”

The $20 million GoodFood Project is looking at seven areas of food safety and quality, including the presence of antibiotic residues in milk, optimal growing conditions for wine, detecting toxic fungi in food and freshness control for fish and fruits, among others.

Food businesses determined the areas of research, choosing sectors where testing for food safety could be improved. Swiss multinational Nestle came on board because it was interested in finding a better way to test for antibiotics in milk used in its many dairy products; their presence can lead to germ resistance in human antibiotic treatments.

Onsite testing at farms prevents contaminated milk from mixing with other milk in transport trucks.Click here to enlarge image

“International laws impose maximum residue limits in milk,” said Jean-Marc Diserens, senior research scientist at Nestle in Lausanne. “But our tolerance is zero when it comes to making baby products.”

The idea is to create an inexpensive portable testing device that would let truck drivers picking up milk at different farms test the milk onsite before allowing it in the truck, so as to avoid mass contamination of the day’s load. Currently, two testing systems are used. The first takes three hours and can detect three families of antibiotics. The second test detects penicillin-related antibiotics in about five minutes, thanks to a dip-stick placed in a vial of milk.

“That test costs about three euros ($3.62), but it’s also a question of time, because every minute saved in the pickup process will be money saved for the transport company,” Diserens said.

The team led by Guy Voirin, head of biosensing in the Nanotechnology and Life Sciences Division at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, is looking to develop a cheaper and faster way to check for residue from several antibiotics. Voirin has designed an optical microsystem capable of detecting concentrations of the sulfapyridine antibiotic as low as 10 nanograms per milliliter, much lower than European regulations require.

“So far, we are able to detect one antibiotic, but are hoping to increase that to 10 or more,” Voirin said, adding that the long-term plan is to adapt the testing device to other foods, such as honey, as a way of amortizing research costs.

Portable devices are used at dairies to ensure milk is antibiotic-free. Photos courtesy of NestleClick here to enlarge image

GoodFood is also testing a means to improve wine production through automatic nodes and sensors capable of analyzing vine growth, leaf temperature, soil moisture and air temperature and humidity. The system is being assessed in Montepaldi, Italy, at a research farm owned by the University of Florence. The information collected by the sensors in the vineyard is meant to help managers make the most informed decisions regarding harvesting, watering and other vine treatment to ensure the best quality wine.

Generally speaking, GoodFood aims to take the analysis away from the laboratory, to get it closer to the food, either where it’s grown or where it’s being transported for consumption. Most of all, the solutions found have to be cheap and easy to use.

“The closer you get to the food producer, the more inexpensive and simple to use these tools need to be,” said Diserens. “We can’t force farmers to use complicated devices or to invest a lot of money in a detection system.”

Most of the tools being developed by the GoodFood Project still need to mature. Once the EU initiative wraps up in mid-2007, the majority of the projects will be at the prototype stage. “Then it will be time for industrialists to take over and to develop real applications,” Cane said.

April 18, 2006 – Konarka Technologies Inc., a developer of power plastic that converts light to energy, announced that Christoph Brabec has been appointed as the company’s chief technology officer. Previously Konarka’s director of polymer photovoltaics, Brabec will guide scientific research efforts as CTO, while working with the company’s technology developments to develop relevant applications.

Since joining Konarka in September of 2004 as part of the acquisition of Siemens’ organic photovoltaic research group, Brabec has led Konarka’s European research and development efforts. Additionally, he has expanded the company’s intellectual property and patent portfolio, while making strong contributions to the development and continued relationship with manufacturing partner KURZ and other European partners, including Merck.

Before joining Konarka, he was project leader for organic semiconductor devices at Siemens Corporate Technology.

By Andreas von Bubnoff
Small Times Contributing Editor

April 14, 2006 – “Magic Nano,” a protective glass and bathroom sealant that was recalled March 28 in Germany after causing sometimes severe breathing problems in consumers, may not be much of a nano product after all.

At least the “nano liquid” used in the sealant does not contain nanoparticles, said Ralf Juergens, a scientist at nanopool GmbH, the company that produces the liquid for the product’s distributor, Kleinmann GmbH. He said the liquid is applied as an aerosol from spray cans and generates an oil and water repelling layer of silicon dioxide that’s about 100 nanometers thin, which is why it is called a nano liquid.

It is possible although not likely that the final product contains nanoparticles, Juergens said. Another company, Hago Chemotechnik GmbH, fills the nano liquid in spray cans and adds a propellant and other chemicals, not all of which are currently known, Juergens said. Representatives of Hago and Kleinmann could not be reached for comment.

Juergens’ statement is in contrast with a statement by René Zimmer of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, or BfR, in Berlin last week. Zimmer said it was still unclear as to whether the nano liquid contains nanoparticles, even after an April 7 meeting of experts and industry representatives. The meeting was convened to identify the ingredients in “Magic Nano” and to understand what caused the health problems. In a statement on April 12, the BfR said that, at the meeting, the distributor of the sealant was unable to provide complete information about the ingredients because of incomplete information from its upstream suppliers.

Although nanopool representatives did not attend the April 7 meeting, Juergens said that he had told a BfR official that the nano liquid did not contain nanoparticles. It could not be confirmed whether the official had communicated this fact to Zimmer.

Whatever the case, the exact ingredients of the final “Magic Nano” product are still unknown, leaving it unclear what caused the breathing problems in about one hundred consumers.

Zimmer said the BfR plans to convene experts again next month after all the companies have completed their analyses into what in the product might be the culprit of the health problems. “Once the data are there, we want to convene the manufacturers in May to finally see what was the cause and who was at fault,” he said.

BfR experts said the problems may have to do with the small droplet size of the fluid after it is sprayed in the air as an aerosol. Aerosol droplets are smaller than 10 micrometers, which enables them to be breathed deeply into the lungs.

This could explain why Kleinmann sold the same product for two and a half years in pump bottles without causing any reported breathing problems in consumers, BfR expert Zimmer said. The droplets from a pump bottle are too large to penetrate deeply into the lungs, he said.

“One thing we have definitely learned at the expert meeting was that spray bottles produce much finer droplets than pump bottles,” Zimmer said. He mentioned other cases in Holland, Switzerland and Austria, where products that didn’t contain nanoparticles had caused breathing problems, probably due to the fine droplet size of an aerosol.

Regardless of whether “Magic Nano” contains nanoparticles, the incident has already led to calls for more safety testing and research of nanotech products.

Patrick Lin of the nanoethics group, a non-partisan think tank, called for more funding of research of the health risk of nanotechnology. And ETC Group, a Canadian-based civil society organization that monitors nanotechnology, renewed a call for a moratorium of all nanotech lab research and for “a recall of consumer products containing engineered nanoparticles” until it can be shown that they are safe.

The confusion over whether or not the “Magic Nano” product really is “nano” points to the need to develop standards for terminology so that there is agreement as to what constitutes a nanoparticle, nanofilm, or a “nanofluid,” said Sean Murdock, executive director of the NanoBusiness Alliance, the U.S. trade association of the nanotech industry. “If companies call things nano that are not and then have issues with them it does create a potential problem with perceived risk being associated with nanotech products,” he said.

Scientists are currently working on developing standard terminology to be used to report research results in scientific journals, said Kristen Kulinowski, director of the International Council on Nanotechnology and an executive director at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University. “But there is nothing yet in the works to ensure that manufacturers of products are adhering to the same sorts of standards with respect to whether they can call the product nano or not,” she said.

What’s more, the incident is a wake-up call for companies about being transparent as to what nanomaterials they are using, said Andrew Maynard of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in a statement on Thursday. Otherwise, it will be difficult to separate the safe nanoproducts from the potentially harmful ones, said Maynard, who is the science advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.