I love the caveats in this public relations-penned mess.

It’s part of the job, and new technology is always oversold, always creates confusion, and eventually mere mortals learn to cope, at which point some other new technology comes along to create unrealistic expectations, confusion, and eventually a therapy class on mindfulness where adults take to the time to color instead of drinking or opioids.

According to Perdue researchers, a new type of electronic sensor that might be used to quickly detect and classify bacteria for medical diagnostics and food safety has passed a key hurdle by distinguishing between dead and living bacteria cells.

Conventional laboratory technologies require that samples be cultured for hours or longer to grow enough of the bacteria for identification and analysis, for example, to determine which antibiotic to prescribe. The new approach might be used to create arrays of hundreds of sensors on an electronic chip, each sensor detecting a specific type of bacteria or pinpointing the effectiveness of particular antibiotics within minutes.

“We have taken a step toward this long-term goal by showing how to distinguish between live and dead bacteria,” said Muhammad Ashraful Alam, Purdue University’s Jai N. Gupta Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This is important because you need to be able to not only detect and identify bacteria, but to determine which antibiotics are effective in killing them.”

Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper was authored by doctoral student Aida Ebrahimi and Alam. The droplet sensor evolved from a device originally designed to detect small concentrations of negatively charged DNA molecules in research that began about four years ago, Ebrahimi said.

(A Youtube video about the research is available at https://youtu.be/QN019bQJCb8?).