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Q-CHeM CHRONICLES - Ten years ago, the Walkerton tragedy shocked Canadians into a whole new level of awareness of drinking water quality. In the wake of this event, Stephen Brown 91ÖÆƬ³§ ’s research group set about developing a new technology for detecting bacteria in water. In a classic story of serendipity, they had already been working on fibre-optic sensors for detecting aromatic compounds as part of a study of impacts of contaminants on fish. They discovered that they could combine the fibre-optic sensor and aromatic compound metabolites to detect the enzymes that happen to be standard indicators of E. coli and coliform bacteria. In collaboration with Peter Aston 91ÖÆƬ³§ ’s group in Microbiology and Immunology, they developed a test with automated detection for those target bacteria. The test exceeds the performance of current lab tests where a technician does visual interpretation, and works in highly coloured and/or opaque samples that can’t be tested by current methods.