WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Dec. 29 (UPI) -- A new, faster way of identifying bacteria such as E. coli could be used for food safety and homeland security, Purdue University researchers said.

The new technique, called desorption electrospray ionization, allowed researchers to "fingerprint" bacteria in less than a minute using a mass spectrometer, a university release stated. Usually analyzing bacteria and other microorganisms takes several hours.

The new technique ionizes molecules outside of the spectrometer's vacuum chamber, researchers said. Once ionized, molecules can be more easily manipulated, detected and analyzed.

The researchers said they were able to detect 1-billionth of a gram of a particular bacterium and could identify its subspecies, a level of accuracy needed to detect and track infectious pathogens.

"We can determine the subspecies and glean other information by looking at the pattern of chemicals making up the pathogen, a sort of fingerprint revealed by mass spectrometry," R. Graham Cooks, a chemistry professor in Purdue's College of Science, said.

"We have proven that this technique is extremely accurate."

Purdue researchers said they would focus on three applications for detecting and identifying pathogens: food safety, medical analysis and homeland security.