Bacteria Exposed to Very High Voltage Potential

Well it is difficult to be electrocuted... Figuratively.

So yes. Of course.

Pulsed electrical fields have been used/investigated for food sterilization, compared to other non thermal methods here:.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27242749

"Inter- and intra-specific differences in microbial resistance to PEF and HHP are much greater than to MS and UV. Similarly, both the pH and aw of the treatment medium highly condition microbial resistance to PEF and HHP but no to MS or UV."

Combined with silver nanoparticles to sterilize surfaces:

https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/silver-electricity-kill-bacteria-heres/

Not sure about using a taser to do the job... what would you do, tase dirty water hoping to make it drinkable? Not just awkward, I wouldn't count on it working.

I want to shake the guts of those bacteria till they pop. If there's some configuration I could use. Probably a low-energy methods.

Have you considered using a microwave? That achieves a similar (shaking) result just using a different (and safer and more uniform) method.

O its a little bit formal and sophisticated. I am searching for simple but rustic method

Well said.

What I find interesting is the notion that a taser could be adapted to the purpose. As long as it would still fire when the leads have been fixed into place, I suppose it could sterilize a liquid as in the above, if you tased it 50 times. That is assuming the voltage of the taser and its transmission in the liquid was adequate for the purpose.

Could the right taser be the ultimate survival tool in case of disaster? Not only a defensive weapon, but a means of obtaining drinkable water?

And how about that old rump roast you dig out of the freezer a week after the power went out. I can imagine you now, standing over it and firing repeatedly...

Bubba, Do not Try DIY Food Safety Research using Your Taser

This picture illustrates a serious problem with solid food sterilization by high voltage fields. The point of the red arrow is going to have an extremely low field intensity. The area between the two entry points of the arc will have high field intensity but the volume of the meat at the point of the red arrow will have almost no electric field. We are talking microbiology here and a teaspoon of sewage can ruin a whole barrel of wine. The bacteria and parasites very close to the point of the arrow are likely to survive and consuming the meat will be indistinguishable from consuming the meat totally untreated. Most of the papers involve liquids and a highly controlled (eg. coaxial) electrical field geometry.

Heating the food to kill the bacteria has the advantage of conduction of heat throughout the volume of the food. Cooking frozen food without thawing presents the same dangers as two point electrocution in that the whole volume of the food does not get "hot" enough to kill the bacteria in some parts of the portion of food. Incomplete cooking is a well known health issue and electric field sterilization will be far harder for your basic imbecile with a taser to wield consistently across the portion than it will be for an idiot with a boiling pot to thoroughly sterilize his stew. I suspect that most of you posting know all this and will claim that it is obvious. Well, when it comes to food safety belaboring the obvious is less dangerous than misleading macho readers into trying taser sterilization of their hunting meat. I do not want to hear about them in desperation out on the trail with life threatening dysentery.

So, Bubba, using a taser on your kill will not keep you safe from biological food poisoning. Boil it in a stew, or fry it thoroughly in a pan like you always have and reserve use of your taser for the purposes you always have. I hope your companions forgive you for the humiliation and I hope their immobilization is only temporary.

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thewildotter

No, not with foods. But exciting to have a bunch of trials just to verify.

Would ultrasound, kills micro-organisms too?

Regarding obtaining safe drinking water, a simple and very easy method has been tested and confirmed as effective--filter the water enough so light passes all the way through it, put it in a plastic (not glass!) container and place it in the sunlight. After a few hours the UV in the sunlight will have killed all the bacteria and it is now safe to drink (in terms of bacterial contamination). It may not be safe from other chemical contaminants, however.

--JMM

"A team from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) made this discovery in collaboration with an international food company, and they have now published their findings. The harmful bacteria are inactivated by means of electroporation, a process that does not require drastic temperature increases, in contrast to conventional thermal preservation methods, which in turn contributes to more effective conservation of nutrients."

https://phys.org/news/2018-10-electric-bacteria.html

Electroporation is the process of imposing a very strong electric field to cause the bacterial walls to become permeable. It is used to introduce foreign DNA into the bacterium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroporation

I have been reading about sterilization with cold plasma for quite a long time. Here is an article from 2012.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3416436/

Must work for I have never seen an infected HV power line not even at the doctors.

nayse one

Depends on the state of the bacteria, I'd say. If you've gathered together, or grown, a blob of relatively dry cell filaments, shooting them would just reduce them to char or soot. Dead.

If they're floating free in a liquid and you shoot the liquid, how dead they get would relate to how densely they're occupying the space, how conductive the liquid is, the voltage of course, and what you're trying to get in the end. Maybe sterile liquid with dead protoplasm bits in it, can't speak to whether that's a good thing. If the liquid was a protein type food, you'll affect that state also (congealing, degrading, altered).

I'd recommend against electrocuting your probiotic breakfast drink.

electrocution then filtration and treatment or other way around? I suppose. Does it matter, sometimes we swallow our own saliva with lots of bacteria on it and it taste just great.

Since I work in a company that grows bacteria we are concerned about this and are always looking for anything that will do the job better, faster, more reliably, cheaper. When bacteria for human consumption is your product your sterilization processes are under constant audit and review.

63c for 30 m is a pasteurization. Sterilization requires a higher temperature, usually considered 121c/250f for standard materials and 132c/270f critical needs. The time and pressure in the chamber also have a lot to do with the effectiveness of autoclave processes.

Then we see UHT being used in place of the above mentioned pasteurization cycle under certain circumstances. We are currently trialing a small one of those for in line processing.

As these units are vital, foundational equipment for what we do I have become far more familiar with them than I would have liked.

Perhaps the frequency of the pulses would be the key to killing the bacteria rather than amperage. Resonate to shake their booty.

yeah, that's what I thought too.

Well I was reading today about the latest "super earth" with water vapour on board. Seven times the mass of the earth, so you realize any life there would have to be seven times stronger than we are. And I thought wow, even if they had just bacteria, can you imagine the resilience of those cell membranes? Our little tasers will not be enough! The microbes of such a planet would doubtless be extremely hard to kill....

even terrestrial bacteria are amazingly hardy.

https://interestingengineering.com/earth-organisms-survive-533-days-in-space-on-the-outside-of-iss

Simple lifeforms have some stunning advantages. Surviving outside the spaceship seems unthinkable, but even algae made it. A barnacle no doubt would be toast.

in order to kill most of our strains we rely on 15 minutes above 121c/250F in a chamber that is running between 18 to 22 pounds above atmospheric pressure. As harsh as that is and including a rapid depressurization does not guarantee a complete kill. It is quite amazing.

You or I would be dead within a few minutes of the unit starting, well before it even hit critical phase.

Many years ago, I read a paper in a published collection regarding using electricity to treat sewage. Now of course I can't find the publication or the reference. I do recall that the voltages were not high.

It would depend more upon the voltage difference across each of them, and less upon the voltage to which they are, as a colony, raised.

I thought so too. Like walking on a grounded power lines. Size of bacteria is so minuscule that voltage difference across for them would also be not of a difference. I got it.