STRATEGIES TO ACCELERATE THE APPLICABILITY OF GENE AMPLIFICATION PROTOCOLS FOR PATHOGEN DETECTION IN MEAT AND MEAT-PRODUCTS

Traditionally, microbiological testing of meat products has involved isolating microorganisms and performing specific biochemical, and in some cases serological, tests to confirm the presence or absence of suspected food-borne pathogens. Given the public attention meat products have received as sources of food-borne disease, there has been considerable interest in the application of rapid detection techniques that require hours rather than days for completion. Theoretically, rapid detection methods could reduce the time from the initial sampling to confirmation so that conclusive results would be available by the time required to process the meat product. Both direct gene probe hybridizations as well as gene amplification methods show promise as rapid detection techniques. At present, direct gene probe hybridizations are being commercially utilized to confirm the presence of a suspected pathogen. A number of gene amplification protocols for detecting food-borne bacterial pathogens have been published. However, many of these studies have utilized spiked samples rather than naturally contaminated samples and many of them have involved extended template extraction/purification methodologies. There is still only a very limited amount of information on the efficacies of the various protocols in detecting bacterial pathogens, especially toxigenic Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp., Campylobacter spp., and Listeria spp., in naturally contaminated food samples. In order to develop gene amplification protocols that have relevance to the meat industry, there must be a concerted effort to utilize naturally contaminated samples in the development and evaluation of protocols, as well as to initiate multilaboratory round robin evaluations of select protocols. Availability of multilaboratory tested methodologies would provide a means to design pathogen detection strategies at the quality control level rather than an end product confirmatory response to an already documented outbreak.