Planning Visit: U.S.- Irish R&D Partnership

This project provides support for a planning visit to Queen's University in Belfast, UK and Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland. The US principal investigator is Laurie Connell from the University of Maine. The foreign collaborators are Chris Elliott in Belfast and Richard O'Kennedy in Dublin. The primary purpose of this planning visit is to develop a full proposal that will be submitted to NSF's Biotechnology, Biochemical, and Biomass Engineering Program (BBBE). The proposal will address BBBE's research priority area of food safety through implementation of nano-biotechnology and biosensor development. The research goal is to develop new technologies to deliver rapid and portable analysis. Over the past several years, there has been substantial progress in a number of areas of sensor technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology. The combination of these approaches could lead to the development of portable technologies capable of producing rapid and reliable analyses for food contaminants of major concern. The researchers involved in this effort have considerable expertise in the areas of toxin analysis, biosensor technology, and protein engineering. By combining this expertise, they expect to deliver working prototypes for the sensor based measurement of selected toxins in the food supply chain.