Abstract
A continuous rise in the wastes from industrial effluents, bio-waste, and pharmaceuticals has deteriorated surface water and drinking water sources. Standard laboratory tests of total coliform are time-consuming and logistically inefficient for field data generation. Better and portable sensing technologies are needed. This paper reports an electrical impedance spectroscopic technique incorporated in a micro-fluidic chip with interdigitated microelectrodes to monitor the growth of microbial cells. Lag, log, and stationary phases of Escherichia coli cell growth with an integrated electrode are successfully detected, for samples of reverse osmosis water, standard treated tap water, and recycled water respectively. The results indicate that reverse osmosis water has a higher probability of contamination with bacterial pathogens compared to the other two types of water samples when subjected to the same amount of added nutrients. The statistical analysis shows a possible single detection range with higher-order regression, and repeat use of a single chip with the electrode was found to be within an acceptable limit. The interdigitated electrodes exposed to in-situ cell growth conditions and repeated electrical measurements have shown a promise for possible periodic or continuous monitoring. The paper further identifies several complimentary analysis methodologies that are robust towards phase noise in the measured impedance and are suited particularly for early-stage detection of bacterial contamination. The cell adhesion tendencies over the microelectrode due to the electric field need to be further analyzed.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.
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Acknowledgments
Authors thankfully acknowledge the financial support under the Indo-German Science and Technology Centre (IGSTC) through the 2+2 project IDC-Water academic partner grant SP/IGST-18-0002 awarded to the Indian Institute of Science to carry out this research; The Authors would like to thank Pooja Murthy for carrying out and assisting with microbial cell culture, Dr. J Manjula, Bigtec Lab Bangalore, India, and Dr. Rudolf Schneider, BAM Berlin for technical suggestion regarding applications of the proposed technique.
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Methodology, Investigation, Validation, Resources, Writing – Review and Editing, Visualization: Subhan Shaik., Sample preparation: Aarthi Saminathan; Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – Original draft preparation, Visualization: Deepak Sharma; Data analysis, algorithm development: Jagdish A Krishnaswamy; Conceptualization, Writing – Review and Editing, Supervision, Project administration, and Fund acquisition: D. Roy Mahapatra.
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Shaik, S., Saminathan, A., Sharma, D. et al. Monitoring microbial growth on a microfluidic lab-on-chip with electrochemical impedance spectroscopic technique. Biomed Microdevices 23, 26 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-021-00564-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-021-00564-1