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 i solating microorganisms and performing specific biochemical, and in so me cases serological, tests to confirm the presence or absence of susp ected food-borne pathogens. Given the public attention meat products h ave received as sources of food-borne disease, there has been consider able interest in the application of rapid detection techniques that re quire hours rather than days for completion. Theoretically, rapid dete ction methods could reduce the time from the initial sampling to confi rmation so that conclusive results would be available by the time requ ired to process the meat product. Both direct gene probe hybridization s as well as gene amplification methods show promise as rapid detectio n techniques. At present, direct gene probe hybridizations are being c ommercially utilized to confirm the presence of a suspected pathogen. A number of gene amplification protocols for detecting food-borne bact erial pathogens have been published. However, many of these studies ha ve utilized spiked samples rather than naturally contaminated samples and many of them have involved extended template extraction/purificati on methodologies. There is still only a very limited amount of informa tion on the efficacies of the various protocols in detecting bacterial pathogens, especially toxigenic Escherichia coli, Salmonella spp., Ca mpylobacter spp., and Listeria spp., in naturally contaminated food sa mples. In order to develop gene amplification protocols that have rele vance to the meat industry, there must be a concerted effort to utiliz e naturally contaminated samples in the development and evaluation of protocols, as well as to initiate multilaboratory round robin evaluati ons of select protocols. Availability of multilaboratory tested method ologies would provide a means to design pathogen detection strategies at the quality control level rather than an end product confirmatory r esponse to an already documented outbreak.