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Development of novel technologies for the concentration and separation of pathogenic bacteria from food combined with rapid endpoint detection

Objective


Foreseen Results

This proposal aims to develop a more rapid approach for the detection of pathogenic microorganisms of food-safety concern. This will be achieved by developing rapid sampling and analysis methods to separate and concentrate specific micro-organisms from complex food systems. This will yield fast sceening procedures for the detection of both Salmonella, in the chicken industry, and Listeria in the dairy and fish industries, and lead to an enhancement in the safety of foods as any potential problems will be more quickly identified and resolved.
The number of reported cases of foodborne poisonings by pathogenic micro-organisms has increased during the last decade. The use of traditional methods for their detection can take up to several days to perform and has relied heavily upon the culturing of micro-organisms using both non-selective and selective growth media. If further confirmation is required, other more specialised methods (e.g. serotyping, phagetyping, biotyping) must additionally be performed. Culturing is the easiest method to naturally amplify the numbers of viable target pathogens for an analysis. However, from a pre-enrichment step typically < 1 % of the homogenate is used the remainder being discarded. The first aim of this project is to harness the full potential of a pre-culturing step by concentrating target organisms from the entire homogenate. This will be achieved by using a novel filtration technologies to remove food debris, followed by collection devices which will specifically concentrate the target pathogens. The pathogens will then be placed into microtiter plates to allow a sensitive end-point detection method to be applied.

Immunologically based end-point detection systems have traditionally relied upon enzymes such as horse radish peroxidase as enzymatic labels on antibodies. However, these only detect approximately 105 cells ml-1. An enhanced microtitre plate-based system incorporating luminescent reagents will be developed, as well as unique amplification technologies. It is anticipated that these approaches will improve sensitivity by up to 2-3 orders of magnitude.

The methods development phase of the project will be performed in very close collaboration with the relevant food producing/processing industries. Historically within the egg and poultry producing/processing sectors there are many food poisoning outbreaks attributable each year to the presence of both Salmonella spp and Campylobacter spp. Also in the dairy industry there are problems with both Listeria monocytogenes (serotype 4b) and Escherichia coli (serotype 0157). In addition both the fish farming and processing industries have also recently experienced problems in relation to contamination of their products with Listeria. All of these industries are economically very important in terms of employment and export potential. It is therefore essential that any problems associated with their output be quickly and effectively investigated in order to establish the source of a food borne outbreak. By developing robust, rapid and sensitive methods to test foodstuffs a higher level of confidence will be aquired by the consumer.

This project will focus on Salmonella spp. in chickens from the UK and Czech Republic, Listeria spp. in cheese from Slovakia and Italy and in smoked fish products from the UK.

Call for proposal

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Coordinator

Robert Gordon University
EU contribution
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Address
St Andrews Street
AB25 1HG Aberdeen
United Kingdom

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Total cost
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Participants (4)