Researchers Use Smartphone to Detect Norovirus in Water

A little bit of norovirus — the highly infectious microbe that causes about 20 million cases of food poisoning in the United States each year — goes a long way. Just 10 particles of the virus can cause illness in humans. With support from NSF through its Water and Environmental Technology Center, a team of University of Arizona researchers recently created a simple, portable and inexpensive method for detecting extremely low levels of norovirus in water. The project was led by Jeong-Yeol Yoon, a researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; Soo Chung, a biosystems engineering doctoral student who works in Yoon's Biosensors