Here, Now, and Soon to Be: A Suite of Food Lab Innovations

Pittcon results suggest the need for more specificity, however. Poe will address this limitation by using higher frequencies that will theoretically trap with a greater discriminating force.

Bug Out

The future capabilities Poe describes are primer-dependent, the bug having already been thoroughly characterized. Some strains of E. coli would frustrate current detection methods, however. A cooperative research and development agreement between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Research Service and DuPont Qualicon has recently been inked to address new toxic E. coli players in the food safety game—the so-called non-O157 Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. “There are six of these that are significant in terms of foodborne illness, ” said Megan DeStefano, global marketing manager for DuPont. “One of the issues is that they don’t have differentiating phenotypic characteristics.”

Although the six bugs in question are not so much new as, say, novel mutations, their increased detection in the food supply has recently intensified concern. DuPont’s mission is to create and/or enhance methods for both phenotypic and genetic detection. “This holistic look is really important because just doing the detection piece is not accurate enough to keep our food safe.”

The three areas of research interest are enrichment, detection, and culture confirmation. “Culture confirmation has been a challenge for government and industry,” said DeStefano. “It really isn’t well-developed.” And the deficit is critical, because, currently, a PCR result is not definitive for the government agencies.

“The biggest hurdle is you’re looking for six different (bugs), all of which act differently,” DeStefano noted. “To be able to find an enrichment and detection method that can equally identify all of them, even in the presence of each other and other background flora, is challenging.” DuPont does have a leg up on the mission; the company’s BAX PCR system is the standard instrument used by the USDA Food Safety and Inspections Service for E. coli 157:H7 detection. So, for the moment, it’s not the machine, it’s the method.

Something Fishy

Species identification is also the business of Applied Food Technologies (AFT) of Alachua, Fla., a company that wants to make sure that the fish you ordered is what made it to your plate. “I’ve worked in seafood industry for 20-plus years” said AFT CEO LeeAnn Applewhite, “and I was very interested in converting traditional microbial tests used in seafood industry to molecular diagnostics. We developed the first molecular diagnostics to identify the species of fish.” Also presenting at Pittcon 2011, Applewhite highlighted the utility of the company’s AUTHENTI-KIT DNA technology platform.

“The reason I was asked to speak at Pittcon is because over the last eight years there has been a lot of media regarding the mislabeling of seafood products in the marketplace.” Some occurs by accident—a lot of fish do look alike—but increasingly, it’s a matter of economic fraud.

The Agilent 6460 Triple Quadrupole LC/MS. Agilent recently entered into a collaboration with the University of California at Davis to develop a new process of pathogen identification that, from field to finding, takes hours rather than days.

Applewhite long ago saw the writing on the global seafood wall and started to collect whole fish, imported from all over the world, and have them taxonomically validated. “We worked with the Smithsonian and others to create reference specimens from which we derived a DNA library of validated gene targets. No one else has this.”