The World's First Glow Light Bandage!

How often have you wondered about finding a quick and easy way to tell whether your pet's wounds were healing better or not with all the layers of bandages covering the wound. Well, there's now a way to tell whether the wound is infected or not. The new invention is sure to be a delightful way to watch the process of healing take place! The bandage actually glows and emits faint light of two colours in response to two types of bacteria.

Benjamin Miller, of the University of Rochester in New York State along with Philippe Fauchet at Rochester, have developed a silicon based colour sensitive sensor which develops a glow that gets altered in the presence of 'Gram-negative' bacteria. Fauchet and colleagues observed that, when Gram-negative bacteria stick to the surface of porous silicon, the colour of the light emitted changes slightly. Based on this observation, they developed a bandage with specially designed molecules that hook chemical groups present only on Gram-negative microbes. The researchers have presented their interesting findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.