Friday, 22nd February 2008 (1104 views)

A new technique that uses gold nanoparticles for the swift identification of bacterial infections has been developed by US researchers.

Scientists at the University of Central Florida have identified a way of detecting bacterial infections that they claim could be critical during epidemics, reports AZoNano.com.

The technique sees gold nanoparticles coated with a sugar and a sugar binding protein, which display optical variation in the presence of different antibiotics that can determine which can stop bacterial growth and which cannot.

While conventional methods of determining this can take days, the new technique can yield results in just a few hours.

"As more bacterial strains resistant to many drugs emerge, it becomes more critical to quickly identify infections and the antibiotics that would most effectively treat them," said the report.

In related news, last month saw researchers from the Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology report in the Nature Biotechnology journal that gold nanoparticles could be used to detect cancerous tumours.

 

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