Giving Compass' Take:

· A new method of becteria detection called ON-rep-seq could be helpful in identifying food poisoning at about 200 times less than traditional methods. 

· How can this research be expanded upon? How can it be used around the world to prevent food illnesses?

· Read more about this topic and targeting foodborne illnesses.

Currently, the detection of food poisoning outbreaks takes a long time and is expensive.

The new method, called ON-rep-seq, examines selective, strain-specific fragments of the bacterial genome, allowing the generation of results that earlier required DNA sequencing of the entire bacterial genome or tedious approaches like pulsed field gel electrophoresis. Pulsed field gel electrophoresis had previously been the golden standard for strain-level typing of microorganisms.

The method has the potential to change the approach for investigating food-based disease outbreaks by making analysis much less time- and cost consuming.

Currently, bacterial detection and identification based on bacterial DNA requires expensive instrumentation and many hours of work by highly trained specialists. Let’s imagine, for example, there is a suspected Salmonella outbreak. Usually in order to locate its origin, not only will investigators have to analyze many samples, but the analysis has to be precise in order to distinguish one bacterial strain from another.

“Our new method allows identification and typing of hundreds of samples in less than two hours, and we expect that this will even be reduced to ‘real time’ in a short period of time,” says Lukasz Krych, associate professor at the food science department at the University of Copenhagen.

Read the full article about bacteria detection by Lene Hundborg Koss at Futurity.