han professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering and co-principal investigator (pi) on the project is working with a team to create a microdevice to rapidly and efficiently characterize the harmfulness of bacteria in the environment they will do this by screening each microorganism in the sample one cell at a time but very rapidly to see if it has the properties of a pathogen since no one can screen millions of cells by hand the team is working on building a microfluidic device or microchip to do so automatically while han is developing the microchip dr james samuel (pi) and dr paul de figueiredo (co-pi) from the department of microbial pathogenesis and immunology in the texas a&m college of medicine will look at the microbial pathogens to determine what aspects of their harmfulness to humans or animals can be tested rapidly using about five to 10 different criteria han and de figueiredo have been working together for the past several years on developing microfluidic devices that can measure a variety of different properties of microorganisms so this request from darpa was right up their alley according to han the problem with the current method is it takes too long to determine if bacteria are pathogenic or not because there are a variety of different mechanisms in which bacteria can harm a human and it can typically only detect pathogenic bacteria that are already known but not the unknowns it is their expectation that their new method will for the first time be able to detect unknown pathogens and also be much more time and cost-efficient we came up with a microchip that allows two things: one is to first grow the unculturable cells (cells that cant be grown using traditional means which occupies most microbes in the environment) as much as possible and second we are trying to measure whether a cell is pathogenic or not without any molecular analysis han said in other words you directly measure whether a toxin is produced by bacteria you directly measure whether bacteria under antibiotic treatment can survive you test whether bacteria go inside a host cell and still survive (when they normally should die) and so on youre measuring directly the property of these bacteria cells in five to 10 different criteria and then combining this information to quickly determine whether a particular bacterial cell has the potential to be pathogenic or not han is also collaborating with dr arul jayaraman the ray b nesbitt professor of chemical engineering on analyzing the metabolites produced by environmental microbial consortia to come up with strategies to improve the chance of culturing the so-called unculturable environmental microbes so that those unculturable environmental microbes can also be tested for their pathogenic potential han said the ultimate goal would be to have a chip that is compact small enough to bring into a field take an environmental sample and within a relatively short period of time determine whether there are pathogenic microbes in that sample this would work for natural and engineered pathogens a task that currently cant be done without the microchip theres no current technology that can measure so many different traits of a bacterium and do that for millions of bacterial cells han said we are the first ones trying to develop this new technology that will enable such analysis and detection this is not improving on something that exists but rather developing something that does not exist the hardest kind of discovery and development to help with different aspects of this project the team also includes investigators from the university of oklahoma university of california san francisco the university of virginia and the argonne national lab while its still in its early stages han believes the final product will not only benefit military personnel who are often deployed in a variety of domestic and foreign environments where their safety is a concern but will also benefit the general population against various existing and emerging infectious diseases such threats also include engineered pathogens that may be introduced by adverse entities if someone has engineered a strain its not on our list of harmful substances because its unknown han said the technology we are developing ultimately has the potential to provide an answer to an unknown microbe to determine whether they can cause harm to a human or not the full team includes han samuel de figueiredo provin jayaraman erin van schaik and jon mogford from texas a&m; adam abate from the university of california san francisco; rebecca wattam allan dickerman and andrew warren from the university of virginia; james davis from argonne national lab; and jizhong zhou from the university of oklahoma