Partners: UCM, University of Applied Sciences Jena (Alemania), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Francia), AIT Austrian Institute of Technology (Austria), University of Groningen (Holanda), Biosensor S.r.l. (Italia), Micronit Microfluidics (Holanda).
The need for environmental, food and biomedical sensing and monitoring is constantly growing, and encompasses the most basic aspects of our lives, such as samoss_logo_oVerlauf110px2atmosphere, drinking water, food and beverages, agricultural products, and healthcare. The ideal technological solution would be small, cheap and autonomous devices and that continuously or on demand report on their findings, with minimal human intervention. Such devices should ideally detect a multitude of threats, chemical and/or biological, and should thus be able to describe complex environments to a data collection and analysis centre. Biosensors, and specifically arrayed biosensors could, in principle, perform such tasks, however it is a fact that such autonomous devices to date do not exist on the market. In the SAMOSS network our overall objective is to develop optochemical sensors, applied to detect relevant analytes such as mycotoxins or antibiotics in foods, drugs in healthcare and endocrine disruptors such as contraceptive hormones in environmental samples, that are able to handle a chain of operations that should constitute an autonomous process starting with a sample and ending with reporting a result as an “answer”.
