3

I am looking for a simple and fast gluten level tester (electronic is fine)

There are the testers available for people with Coeliac's which require making a solution from a food sample, and then adding a drop of that to a test strip and waiting some time. They don't tend to actually say how much gluten is present, just that there is

I am hoping for something that uses a very small sample and can perform a test in less than a minute. This ideally can be done at the food wholesalers premises. The result should indicate the amount of gluten in the sample

Edit:

Found a 16Kg machine that takes more than 5 minutes per test, getting closer http://factory.dhgate.com/electronic-measuring-instruments/gluten-tester-mj-iii-p38573988.html

TFD
  • 25,107
  • 5
  • 48
  • 90

1 Answers1

2

You would probably want to create something like an ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay), similar to the home pregnancy tests you can buy at the pharmacy. The machine you linked to is to test large quantities of gluten in wheat flour, much more than what it would take to cause illness in someone who is gluten-sensitive.

Doing this at home would probably be rather challenging without a "kitchen lab" that is better equipped than that of the Modernist Cuisine folks as you need to do the following:

1) Create an antibody to gluten. Bind the antibody to your test substrate.

2) Create an antibody to the antibody-gluten complex. Add a marker to this antibody.

3) Put the sample through your test substrate, add the antibody-marker to develop.

It's expensive to do the first time but once you do it you can start to see economies of scale when you ramp it to mass-production.

RudyB
  • 1,071
  • 7
  • 16
  • Forgot to add that you can make this quantitative instead of the qualitative test you described by using a standardized sample size and calibrating your marker detector over the presumed concentration range you intend to test. – RudyB Aug 22 '12 at 20:33