Dr Michelle Dickinson: Nanotechnologist on the sensing chip technology that determines the sex of yet-to-hatch chickens

Sorry, not too nice a topic for Sunday but one that probably needs some awareness. 

Where did your eggs come from? 

Most people would think – a chicken, and leave it at that, but the specifics are that they come from a female chicken, so what happens to the 7 billion male chicks that are born worldwide every year? 

Most hatcheries across the world still sort chicks by their sex a day after they hatch, with male chicks being culled by maceration (being shredded) or by gassing when they are 1 day old. 

The practice is approved by New Zealand's welfare codes and the SPCA, but new technology could help to make it avoidable 

With hope to end this practice, scientists have invented a new method to determine the sex of yet-to-hatch chickens by sniffing chemicals on eggshells. 

The new study, published in the journal PLoS One demonstrated that it is possible to sort eggs by sex early in incubation, based on volatile organic chemicals emitted through egg shells. 

They developed a sensing chip technology to collect and analyse organic chemicals in the air and attached it to a suction cup that was used for the industrial handling of eggs. 

These cups were then able to “sniff” the eggs without opening them and were 80% accurate in differentiating male from female embryos within eggs. 

While the process currently takes 2 minutes of “sniffing” to be reliable – the researchers hope to create a more sensitive detector that can be attached to multiple suction cups for a faster throughput system. 

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