Researchers from the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague have developed a way to remove Staphylococcus aureus from milk using magnetic micro-robots (MagRobots). The researchers believe that the technology can be successfully adapted to other foodborne pathogens and scaled for industry use in food production.
The researchers chose to test their MagRobots against S. aureus as it cannot be easily eliminated from food with traditional techniques such as pasteurization. The pathogen also produces immunoglobulin binding proteins, which can be used to selectively bind pathogenic bacteria for isolation and identification without attracting harmless and beneficial bacteria.