Detecting water and foodborne contaminants usually involves collecting a sample, sending it to a laboratory and waiting for it to be filtered, incubated, tested and identified under a microscope. If a critical infection is suspected, say for E. coli, the pathogen may already have multiplied and spread before the report arrives days later. 

A series of "lab on a chip" applications in development at the University of Arizona can identify pathogens in minutes rather than days, using a simple device (which may be attached to a faucet) that can deliver results locally.

Invented by chemical and electrical engineers in the late 1990s, the lab on a chip, or LOC, concept is based on the integrated circuit, where encapsulated wires and circuits are integrated into a semiconductor chip with electricity flowing through it.

"In lab on a chip, instead of using electricity, the liquid flows," said Jeong-Yeol Yoon, an assistant professor in the UA department of agricultural and biosystems engineering and a member of the BIO5 Institute.