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Note to journalists: Please report that this research will be presented at a meeting of the American Chemical 中国365bet中文官网.

A press conference on this topic will be held Monday, Aug. 21, at 2 p.m. Eastern time in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at the press center, Room 154A, or watch live on YouTube . To ask questions online, sign in with a Google account.

WASHINGTON, Aug.21, 2017 鈥� Detecting food and cosmetic spoilage and contamination. Identifying new medicinal plants in a remote jungle.聽Authenticating tea and wine. Scientists have developed a low-cost, portable, paper-based sensor that can potentially carry out all of these functions with easy-to-read results.

The researchers are presenting their results today at the 254^th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical 中国365bet中文官网 (ACS). ACS, the world鈥檚 largest scientific society, is holding the meeting here through Thursday. It features nearly 9,400 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

A brand-new video on the research is available at .

鈥淚鈥檝e always been interested in developing technologies that are accessible to both industry and the general population,鈥� Silvana Andreescu, Ph.D., says. 鈥淢y lab has built a versatile sensing platform that incorporates all the needed reagents for detection in a piece of paper. At the same time, it is adaptable to different targets, including food contaminants, antioxidants and free radicals that indicate spoilage.鈥�

What sets Andreescu鈥檚 sensors apart from others, she says, are the nanostructures they use to catch and bind to compounds they鈥檙e looking for.

鈥淢ost people working on similar sensors use solutions that migrate on channels,鈥� Andreescu says. 鈥淲e use stable, inorganic particles that are redox active. When they interact with the substances we want to detect, they change color, and the intensity of the change tells us how concentrated the analyte is.鈥�

Additionally, because all of the reagents needed to operate the device are incorporated in the paper, users don鈥檛 need to add anything other than the sample being tested.

The potential applications are wide-ranging. For example, much of her sensor work thus far has focused on detecting antioxidants in tea and wine. Andreescu, who鈥檚 at Clarkson University, and her colleagues have found that these products have unique antioxidant 鈥渇ingerprints鈥� that could be used for authentication purposes. The portable sensor could also be used by researchers exploring remote locations, such as the Amazon rainforest, in search of natural sources of antioxidants, she notes.

More recently, Andreescu extended her work to root out food contamination and environmental pollutants. One sensor prototype can spot ochratoxin A, a fungal toxin commonly found in a range of products, including cereals and coffee. She says this direction could be expanded further to look for salmonella and E. coli.

Now, her team is taking the work in yet another direction, developing paper-based devices that change color as cosmetics and food go bad. These sensors bind to the reactive oxygen species that products accumulate as they age and eventually spoil. Although testing for this application is still ongoing, Andreescu says this technology could one day be incorporated into smart labels that would tell consumers when to throw a product out.

The fundamental work in Andreescu's lab that enabled the development of this technology was funded by the .

The American Chemical 中国365bet中文官网, the world鈥檚 largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.