The National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) here in Hyderabad had recently introduced an indigenously developed a pathogen detection kit. The kit can be used by food manufactures and exporters to check the quality of their products. To bring this cost effective food pathogen detector to light, scientists at NIN had conducted joint research in collaboration with Bioserve Biotechnology for two years.

The newly developed kit can detect pathogens within 24 hours. The kit works based on the gene sequencing process know as polymerase chain reaction.

The kit developed by NIN costs only Rs.11,000 and it can be bought by small laboratories. They can even collect samples and send them to Bioserve, where after detecting the presence or absence of pathogens a soft copy of the report is sent back in a single day.

Usually the pathogen detection kits are imported from foreign countries and that too they are available with only a few big laboratories. The cost of the imported kits is also very high and ranges from Rs.20,000 to 30,000. They are not affordable to small laboratories.

“The technology which we have developed is robust. The results obtained by the newly developed kit stands 90-95 per cent accurate and it helps food manufacturers and exporters to gauge the quality of their food products accurately,” said Dr V Sudershan Rao, assitant director, NIN.

With the introduction of this new kit the waiting time for food manufacturers has drastically reduced. Conventional methods that are currently in use make the food manufacturers wait for more than five days. Now the waiting time has been reduced to just one day.