Potential of Flow Cytometric Approaches for Rapid Microbial Detection and Chracterization in the Food Industry—A Review

As microbial contamination is persistent within the food and bioindustries and foodborne infections are still a significant cause of death, the detection, monitoring, and characterization of pathogens and spoilage microorganisms are of great importance. However, the current methods do not meet all relevant criteria. They either show (i) inadequate sensitivity, rapidity, and effectiveness; (ii) a high workload and time requirement; or (iii) difficulties in differentiating between viable and non-viable cells. Flow cytometry (FCM) represents an approach to overcome such limitations. Thus, this comprehensive literature review focuses on the potential of FCM and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) for food and bioindustry applications. First, the principles of FCM and FISH and basic staining methods are discussed, and critical areas for microbial contamination, including abiotic and biotic surfaces, water, and air, are characterized. State-of-the-art non-specific FCM and specific FISH approaches are described, and their limitations are highlighted. One such limitation is the use of toxic and mutagenic fluorochromes and probes. Alternative staining and hybridization approaches are presented, along with other strategies to overcome the current challenges. Further research needs are outlined in order to make FCM and FISH even more suitable monitoring and detection tools for food quality and safety and environmental and clinical approaches.

A Study Into the Use of Milliflex Quantum as Rapid Microbial Detection Method for Microorganisms in Pharmaceutical...

Control of pharmaceutical water systems represents an essential part of Good Manufacturing Practice and embedded within this is the quality control testing of water systems for viable microorganisms, and subjecting the data obtained to trend analysis. This has traditionally been achieved by membrane filtration and the use of a culture medium. While such test methodologies can recover a level of the bioburden present, the incubation times are lengthy. To address the problem of time-to-result, rapid microbiological methods offer an alternative approach. One such example is the Milliflex Quantum, which is the focus of this article.

Nanotechnology in food safety and quality assessment: potentiality of nanoparticles in diagnosis of foodborne pathogens

A rapid microbial detection in different biological and environmental material is a key of preventing several foodborne diseases. By implementing nanotechnology into food safety sector, a great step towards successful, reliable and sensible detection methods of foodborne pathogens has been achieved. Therefore, the aim of this review was to illustrate some of the principal functions of nanotechnology-based techniques, used for microbial detection in the last few years. Regarding consumer’s health, the review also discusses the question of safety, concerning human exposure to nanomaterials (NMs). Due to their different composition-unique properties, such as greater penetrability, reactivity and high surface to volume ratio, NMs have been coupled to several biomolecules and integrated in special system devices, resulting in improvement of sensitivity in transmitting biological signal informations in a shorter time. Among all the NMs, gold, magnetic and fluorescent nanoparticles (NPs) have been widely used, also in microbial diagnosis. Despite the success of linking nanotechnology to detection of foodborne pathogens, the exposure to various NMs could also be a matter of potential risk to human health, although conclusions still need to be definitely proven.