The European collaborative Poseidon project says it has developed a scanner that can detect Legionella bacteria in under one hour rather than the 10 days of cultivation and analysis normally required.
The scanner, equipped with tiny sensors, uses the technique of surface plasmon resonance (SPR), a procedure that reads information from a refracted laser beam. According to Poseidon, this allows fast, highly sensitive, inexpensive detection from a small sample without the need for “labelling,” the process of binding to a protein in order to be detected.