Isolation and identification of foodborne pathogens of special interest in food safety

Resumen

Food safety is a priority for the population and is nowadays more important than ever due to certain dietary trends such as the consumption of raw foods and the widespread distribution of organic foods, which may be the cause of foodborne diseases. To ensure food safety, the detection of these microorganisms must be done quickly and efficiently. Although, the microbiological culture method is considered to be the official method for the detection of these food-borne pathogens, it suffers from significant drawbacks, such as time-consuming, laborious and expensive, in addition it may be limited regarding the detection of physiologically altered and/or stressed bacteria, during storage and preservation. In this work has been developed a simple and rapid protocol for the simultaneous detection of E. coli, L. monocytogenes, S. aureus and S. enterica in food, by combining a liquid co-culture step and detection by multiplex PCR. The efficiency of several enrichment media was evaluated and buffered peptone water was chosen as the optimal medium for the co-culture of the four target bacteria. Then, optimized multiplex PCR conditions were applied to both the co-cultures and the samples of artificially inoculated foods, organic lettuce and ground meat. After optimization, the developed multiplex PCR was able to simultaneously detect the four bacteria, up to an initial inoculation of 10^0 CFU/mL. In the presence of the two inoculated food matrices, after a co-culture step, the multiplex PCR could simultaneously detect the 3 bacteria: E. coli, S. enterica and L. monocytogenes, whereas, S. aureus has been detected by simplex PCR, from the same co-culture DNA template. The results obtained allow conclusion that the use of a co-culture step in Buffered Peptone Water, before detection by simplex and multiplex PCR, can facilitate the simultaneous detection of the four bacteria potentially present in the food matrices. The presence or the absence of the target bacteria in food is confirmed in approximately 30 hours, which reduce the time required for the detection compared to the minimum time of 7 days by cultural method. Also, it allows to reduce the number of culture media and reagents, for the isolation and identification of bacteria that are not detected by PCR and which are not initially present in the food matrices, which represents a significant economic savings.