Vlada Chaidonova, a young TSU physicist, is developing a spectral express method for determining antibiotics in food using a fluorescent marker. This method reduces food research time from two days to 15 minutes.
Vlada Chaidonova is a postgraduate student of the Department of Optics and Spectroscopy, Faculty of Physics. She also works at the Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology, so her dissertation research is directly related to her future place of work.
A fluorescent marker is a substance that is introduced into a product and shows the presence of certain technogenic impurities in it. It is assumed that the list of products where antibiotics can be quickly detected with the help of a marker will be, first of all, dairy products.
- Currently there are no such approved methods, so the topic of search work is relevant. These studies interested my supervisor, Professor Olga Tchaikovskaya, and we decided to take part in the competition, - says Vlada Chaydonova. - At the first stage, we have to investigate the spectral and luminescent properties of antibiotics in biological systems. Then we will look for a suitable fluorescent marker. Finally, we will try to test the methodology at the Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology on real food products.
Now the checking of products for antibiotics is carried out mainly by chromatography - the separation and analysis of mixtures of substances, and the study of their physical and chemical properties. Such work is quite lengthy because including preparation of samples, it can take about two days. Of course, it will not be possible to exclude sample preparation from the technological process, but the very study of products for the presence of antibiotics with the introduction of a marker can be reduced to about 15 minutes.