Latest news with #BioScout
RNZ News
05-08-2025
- Health
- RNZ News
Shoe-box sized device helps growers detect diseases
The two-year trial at Pukekohe involving BioScout units aims to help growers make better disease management decisions. Photo: Supplied A new device is helping growers detect diseases out of thin air. The two-year trial at Pukekohe involving BioScout units aims to help growers make better disease management decisions. Three of the shoe box-sized units have been set up by Te Ahikawariki Vegetable Industry Centre of Excellence (VICE) with support from Vegetables New Zealand Inc, Onions NZ and Potatoes New Zealand. They sit upon a stand and are powered by solar panels. A small intake on the front of the machine collects air samples which pass over a bit of tape. Daniel Sutton, research development and extension manager for Vegetables New Zealand, explained a microscopic camera take images of the particles - such as pollen or fungal spores - which are stuck to the tape and then analysed by artificial intelligence to see if they carry disease. "What we're doing is using this tool to evaluate the amount of disease spores in the air and we're looking at ground truthing that in terms of the range of different vegetable crops that we grow in the area - potatoes, onions, lettuce, brassicas, carrots and the like," Sutton said. "We're trying to evaluate what we're seeing in the machine versus what we're seeing in the crop." Sutton said this tool would help "fill in the gap" around the pathogen and provide a continual flow of information of what disease is around and how much of it. "Disease infection 101 is you need a susceptible host, you need the environment to be favourable for the disease to infect and you need the pathogen to be present." He said it will help them identify some of the "big" diseases like target spot in potatoes and white mould in carrots. It was an "exciting" example of how technology was helping the sector. Sutton said, if they worked as expected, the hope was to establish a network of such BioScout units across major vegetable growing regions in the country. There are about 20 such units across the country, with arable farmers and grape growers having also adopted the tech. "If they can all talk and connect to one another than we'd actually have a nationwide network looking for these key diseases for us." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
The Age
31-05-2025
- Health
- The Age
The toxic blooms hiding in many of our homes – and a new way to find them
'The resolution of human eyesight is about 80 micrometers, and most of the time, the aerosols of concern are much smaller,' said UTS Associate Professor Nicholas Surawski, the project's lead. 'Indoor mould is exactly that; you can see the mould patterns on a wall, but you can't visualise the individual spores that are causing harm.' Mould testers currently use sticky strips to trap spores and count them manually under the microscope. They also grow captured spores on agar plates to identify which species are present. Those methods, however, are time-intensive, can miss hidden moulds and have error rates between 30 and 200 per cent, partly because they only capture small windows of time while spore concentrations can vary by a 10,000-fold difference over a single day. The BioScout device automates spore-sampling in the air around crops by taking a snapshot through a microscope and harnessing AI to analyse whether mildew, rust, or diseases such as grape-rotting botrytis are present. 'It could maybe take an expert 20 minutes to analyse one image,' said Dr Michelle Demers, head of science at BioScout. 'We can essentially train AI to replicate the behaviour of an expert, except that it can do 100,000 images in a quarter of a second. 'The beauty of it is we can not only tell you what you have, but we can tell you how much of it you have.' The effort to repurpose the device into an indoor monitoring tool is backed by a grant from the NSW Chief Scientist's office through the NSW Smart Sensing Network's Grand Challenge Fund. 'It could really help with our understanding of exposure limits. It's a very complex area to monitor and evaluate,' said Western Sydney University occupational hygienist Dr Margaret Davidson, another researcher on the project. 'The concealed mould is particularly nasty and hard to identify because if you can't see it, and people are getting sick, they might be blaming other things.' Former Sydney renter Emmeline, a nurse who did not want her last name used, said she was sick with flu-like symptoms for a year from hidden mould at a Meadowbank apartment. She moved into a West Ryde flat with her now-husband who then also became sick for months with vertigo and cyclical vomiting. Doctors said it was probably linked to mould growing up through their floorboards. As soon as they moved out, symptoms lifted. Loading The World Health Organisation estimates 10 to 50 per cent of Australian homes have mould. Dr Heike Neumeister-Kemp, an international expert in the field, said mould was almost always hidden, usually within wet walls or damp crawl spaces. She warned in a 2023 paper that mould poses a danger to those returning to homes after floods. The victims recovering from the northern NSW flood disasters are on her mind. People often particularly fear black mould, but fragments and spores of any mould can trigger health issues, and some secrete toxins as well, Neumeister-Kemp said.
Sydney Morning Herald
31-05-2025
- Health
- Sydney Morning Herald
The toxic blooms hiding in many of our homes – and a new way to find them
'The resolution of human eyesight is about 80 micrometers, and most of the time, the aerosols of concern are much smaller,' said UTS Associate Professor Nicholas Surawski, the project's lead. 'Indoor mould is exactly that; you can see the mould patterns on a wall, but you can't visualise the individual spores that are causing harm.' Mould testers currently use sticky strips to trap spores and count them manually under the microscope. They also grow captured spores on agar plates to identify which species are present. Those methods, however, are time-intensive, can miss hidden moulds and have error rates between 30 and 200 per cent, partly because they only capture small windows of time while spore concentrations can vary by a 10,000-fold difference over a single day. The BioScout device automates spore-sampling in the air around crops by taking a snapshot through a microscope and harnessing AI to analyse whether mildew, rust, or diseases such as grape-rotting botrytis are present. 'It could maybe take an expert 20 minutes to analyse one image,' said Dr Michelle Demers, head of science at BioScout. 'We can essentially train AI to replicate the behaviour of an expert, except that it can do 100,000 images in a quarter of a second. 'The beauty of it is we can not only tell you what you have, but we can tell you how much of it you have.' The effort to repurpose the device into an indoor monitoring tool is backed by a grant from the NSW Chief Scientist's office through the NSW Smart Sensing Network's Grand Challenge Fund. 'It could really help with our understanding of exposure limits. It's a very complex area to monitor and evaluate,' said Western Sydney University occupational hygienist Dr Margaret Davidson, another researcher on the project. 'The concealed mould is particularly nasty and hard to identify because if you can't see it, and people are getting sick, they might be blaming other things.' Former Sydney renter Emmeline, a nurse who did not want her last name used, said she was sick with flu-like symptoms for a year from hidden mould at a Meadowbank apartment. She moved into a West Ryde flat with her now-husband who then also became sick for months with vertigo and cyclical vomiting. Doctors said it was probably linked to mould growing up through their floorboards. As soon as they moved out, symptoms lifted. Loading The World Health Organisation estimates 10 to 50 per cent of Australian homes have mould. Dr Heike Neumeister-Kemp, an international expert in the field, said mould was almost always hidden, usually within wet walls or damp crawl spaces. She warned in a 2023 paper that mould poses a danger to those returning to homes after floods. The victims recovering from the northern NSW flood disasters are on her mind. People often particularly fear black mould, but fragments and spores of any mould can trigger health issues, and some secrete toxins as well, Neumeister-Kemp said.
