Container-Integrated Plasmonic Metasurface Interfaces for Camera-Readable Bacterial Surveillance in Liquid Environments.

Abstract

Bacterial contamination in liquid products remains a major challenge for food safety and public health, yet conventional detection methods generally rely on sampling-and-testing workflows that disrupt the original state of sealed containers. This limitation makes it difficult to perform nondestructive, item-level surveillance during transportation, storage, and consumer use. Here, we report a container-integrated plasmonic metasurface interface for camera-readable bacterial surveillance in liquid environments. The metasurface interface can be conformally integrated onto the inner surfaces of transparent containers through a clean nanotransfer lithography process, enabling long-term monitoring of contamination-related changes. Instead of relying on spectral interrogation, bacterial attachment and proliferation processes are converted into spatial transmission image patterns that can be directly acquired using a camera or smartphone. This image-based readout enables in situ monitoring of bacterial proliferation and quantitative detection of Escherichia coli in closed liquid systems. Furthermore, deep image-feature analysis enables label-free grouping of E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and their mixed samples with an accuracy of 95%. This work establishes a container-integrated metasurface interface for sampling-free bacterial surveillance, offering a promising route toward nondestructive microbial screening in beverage safety and other closed liquid systems.