Development of Portable Marine Toxin Biosensors for Shellfish Industry

Hazardous marine toxin especially domoic acid poses the greatest threat to the shellfishindustry which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars loss and damage marine ecosystem.However traditional laboratory based chemical analysis methods such as gas chromatographywith mass spectroscopy (GC-MS) are ill suited for detecting marine toxin in shellfish as they areexpensive time-consuming and incapable of conducting on-site testing. The overarching goal ofthis Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) project is to develop a rapid ultra-sensitivecost-effective and portable biosensing technique to detect track and predict the threat of marinetoxin which will minimize the economic loss to the shellfish industry and enhance seafoodsafety. In this SBIR project E-Lambda LLC and Oregon State University will developdiatomaceous earth microfluidic channel devices that can perform thin layer chromatography(TLC) to separate marine toxins and other hazardous chemicals from simple blended shell fishsamples and simultaneously detect trace level of marine toxins at the sensitivity of several part- per-billion using surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). In addition an advanced machine- learning algorithm based on quaternion principal component analysis in tandem with supportvector regression (QPCA-SVR) will be applied to analyze the TLC-SERS data to suppresspotential contaminant interference and obtain highly accurate quantification results. Comparedwith traditional GC-MS analytical methods the proposed TLC-SERS sensing technique canprovide similar level of sensitivity and comparable quantification accuracy but with dramaticreduction of cost and time and not to mention the unprecedented on-site testing capability.The proposed portable marine toxin biosensors will enhance seafood safety and benefit manyU.S. coastal community customers in numerous ways: 1) private seafood testing companies willreduce the cost by 95% compared with traditional GC-MS techniques; 2) seafood processingplants can directly conduct in-house testing and obtain results within 15 minutes which will savethe sample preparation and shipping cost and more critically the near-real-time results willminimize the loss of harvesting and processing toxic shellfish for both the seafood companiesand fishermen; and 3) government agencies and university researchers will be able to monitor themarine toxin much more efficiently and more frequently which can track the change of marinetoxin and provide longer warning time before the toxin spikes. We must point out that theportable sensing technology similar to universal chemical analytical tools like GC-MS can bereadily applied to detect other hazardous chemicals in various food samples simply by trainingthe machine-learning algorithm with new experimental results. In other words the technologydeveloped under this SBIR project will benefit the entire food industry. From the commercialstandpoint the market of global food safety testing is forecasted to reach $14 billion by 2020.The proposed portable biosensor technology has the potential to occupy a significant position inthis market. The commercialization efforts will be carried out through the partnership with theOSU Venture Accelerator which is an incubator that provides important support services toentrepreneurs in emerging ventures development. In addition we will collaborate with WestCoast Seafood Processors Association for the initial product testing.