Micro Imaging Technology Inc (MMTC)

[TSTARK]

I agree that Dr. Bhunia is one of the top experts in the field of food safety. So It is very telling that he chose Dr. Haavig to collaborate with in the lab and deliver a speech at the 2015 IAFP. His email segment is somewhat confusing however. He refers to "picked colonies". Is he referring to the MMTC protocol ? They haven't used this technique since July 2014. The current protocol used by MMTC bypasses any colony growth by using immunomagnetic separation and enrichment to reduce the total identification time to 3-6 hours. The Bardot protocol still requires colony growth in order to identify each species and therefore they are limited by the time required to grow each colony forming unit (CFU) which can take up to 24 hours or even longer in the case of listeria monocytogenes. Don't forget that Dr. Haavig received his patent for single cell identification two years before Purdue could patent the Bardot, which was patented for colony identification. This is an inherent limitation of the Bardot system because it will always be dependent on the time limitation of colony growth. What Dr. Bhunia seems to be explaining in his email is the advantage of automated colony selection of the Bardot system as compared to others, he doesn't mention that MMTC has bypassed this entire step altogether and now has reduced the total identification time significantly. To my knowledge the Bardot has not reduced the total time for identification nor will they since they are still required to grow entire colonies. Until 2014 the MIT 1000 and Bardot were very similar; one used entire colonies to identify bacterial species and the other used single organisms. But now the MIT 1000 can utilize immunomagnetic separation to capture single bacteria from a liquid medium and still test it at the single cell level for more rapid identification. The Bardot simply cannot. Immunomagnetic separation always results in single cells, not colonies and therefore can not be used independently with the Bardot technique. My question is why would Dr. Bhunia collaborate so closely with Dr. Haavig both in the laboratory and and at the lectern if he didn't see any value in the work of the MIT 1000? Dr. Bhunia's words may stem from a healthy scientific competition, but his actions certainly say otherwise.