This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: After a cyclospora outbreak and recalls of imported beef over the summer, a recent Gallup poll found that Americans' confidence in food safety has fallen to a record low, and consumers may be wondering how foodborne illness outbreaks can be tracked and mitigated. In this Q&A, experts Jasna Kovac, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J.
Lloyd Huck Chair in Microbiomes in Food Safety, and Edward Dudley, director of the E. coli Reference Center and professor of food science, both from Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, discussed how technology can be used to track outbreaks and pathogens, as well as the work happening at Penn State to help keep the food supply safe. Kovac: The pathogens that are routinely tracked are bacteria that can be cultured from clinical, food and environmental samples, such as salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and campylobacter. Viruses such as norovirus and hepatitis A may cause a large share of foodborne illness, but they are harder to track the same way because they cannot be easily cultured.
Tracking pathogens enables identification of the major sources and reservoirs, and that information can then inform the design of more targeted and effective interventions to prevent spread from those sources to food and to humans. Dudley: Whole genome sequencing—a process that determines the complete DNA sequence of an organism's genetic material—can identify bacteria down to the strain level. For example, if you have a salmonella sample from a food product and one from a patient, you can look at the DNA of those two samples and determine whether they're the same strain or not.
If they are, it's possible the patient may have gotten sick from that product. If they're distinct, investigators may need to keep looking for what else the individual ate that made them ill. Additionally, there's growing interest in eventually applying this method to parasites.
Cyclospora, for example, was a problem with lettuce this past summer. But the genomes of cyclospora are much bigger than they are with bacteria, so it's more expensive and the analysis pipelines aren't as established as they are with bacteria. Kovac: My lab uses whole-genome sequencing along with other methods to predict how foodborne pathogens survive and grow in food, as well as how risky they are in terms of causing illness and resisting antimicrobials.
We also are studying the relationship between pathogen contamination in food processing facilities and the composition of microbial communities, which are all the microorganisms in an environment that we sample. We are exploring this to see whether community composition can serve as an early warning of increased risk for pathogen persistence in those environments. Dudley: Another one that my lab has been leading is Pennsylvania's effort in a federal program called GenomeTrackr for about the last 10 years.
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