SensNews Dec 2018

Sensor100 December 2018 12 Agriculture and Food Future Food-Tech returns to San Francisco March 21- 22, 2019 New Graphene-based Sensor Design Could Improve Food Safety In the journal Optical Materials Express, researchers report a new design for a sensor that can simultaneously detect multiple substances including dangerous bacteria and other pathogens. Researchers designed a new sensor with an array of nanoscale graphene disks that each contain an off-center hole.When light from above hits the arrays, the interaction between the disks and their holes increases the sensitiv- ity of the sensor and enables the detection of two substances at once (red balls).The disks are located between an ion-gel (green) and calcium fluoride (dark pink) layers, which are used to apply a voltage to the sensor and to aid in the generation of a surface plasmon, respectively. Credit: Bing-Gang Xiao, China Jiliang University Reported by: The Optical Society 4 December Our hungry planet: new tools in agrigenomics are key to food security Food security is a major global threat and traditional methods of plant and animal breeding will not be sufficient to increase production to the level needed to sustain the growing world popula- tion. Modern genomics-driven breeding, through analysis based on technologies such as next generation sequencing (NGS) and arrays, is revolutionizing agri- culture and making genomic selection a viable approach throughout the industry. Biosearch Technologies 11 December