Long-Range Electrokinetic Bioparticle Trap

Detection of microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses is important in a variety of fields such as bioscience research, medical diagnosis, screening analysis in food processing and for environmental testing. Bacterial contamination of food, water and the environment is on the rise around the globe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates 76 million food-borne illnesses each year in the US, with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths [1 ]. Contaminated dinking water, beaches and improperly disinfected swimming pools [2] have also been implicated as a source of infection. Current practices of prevention rely on real-time monitoring of various types of pathogenic bacteria. However, at present real-time bacteria detection has a typical sensitivity on the range of 10-10 CFU/ml [3 ], while pathogenic bacteria are generally present at very dilute concentrations (< 100 CFU/ml) and still be an infectious dose.