Salmonella Detection Market

The pathogenic detection industry has a market value that has been rising in the last years, presenting a market value of 563 million dollars in 2002 for the USA.

This industry presents applications in the health, military, ambient and food areas thus having various sectors to grow. Despite the several areas of application, it has been in the food industry where it has displayed more growth, because it’s where there are higher rates of contamination as we can see in table 1.

Table 1: Food illnesses in the US caused by major foodborne pathogens (CDC, 1999)

In the market there are two types of analysis: the conventional method and the rapid where the great difference between them is the time and precision of the analysis.

Due the great need of controlling the food quality and ensure the health of the consumers, it becomes necessary a continuous and strict control, thus more than 100 millions analysis are made per year in the US, table 2.

Table 2 - US food industry total microbial tests per sector

In the US there are more than 60 thousand food processing installations, 250 thousand food selling establishments and around 600 thousand restaurants and take-away establishments. All of them are possible buyers of our detection system of Salmonella.

Screening for the presence of Salmonella in foods by conventional methods involve a 3-step technique: non-selective pre-enrichment (18-24 hours), selective enrichment in (at least) two different selective broth media (24-48 hours) followed by plating on (at least) two different selective/indicative agars (24-48 hours). This leads to a total time for yes/no screening result of up to 5 days.

There are various methods for the detection of the Salmonella bacteria most of them involve culture enrichment.

At the moment there are several kits for the detection of Salmonella, which rely in different technologies like for example real-time PCR and antigens.

Im compiling a table of the common producers of these kits. I'll post it in here in a post to come.

Related articles

• Are You Safe From Salmonella?
• Possible salmonella taint prompts hazelnut recall
• Salmonella Outbreak Traced to Chicken Not Surprising, Says Attorney William Marler
• Minnesota Valley Testing Laboratories Strengthens Commitment To Timely, Efficient Food Safety Testing with Roka Bioscience Atlas System
• Natura Expands Nationwide Pet Food Recall Due To Salmonella Concerns (VIDEO)

Bacterial celullose - One more point of view

Continuing the subject of bacterial cellulose, one of the major advantages of its application on food is the fact it is not consumed by the organism.

What does this mean? Simple when it’s consumed it’s simply ignored by the organism; it’s not assimilated and has no nutritional value.

However it can affect the flavor and texture of the food allowing the creation of appealing food with much less calories. We have the example of light drinks in Japan.

Another plus is the fact that bacterial cellulose is quite resistant to heat and low pH which means, one is able to introduce it in all sorts of production lines.

In the end bacterial cellulose will take a major role in the production of light food.

Diet cheese

Yeasts and food - Beer

Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Beer is a famous beverage mainly consumed in the north and centre European countries. It is appreciated by almost all people there and most of them don´t know that this product is in the roots of Biotechnology. Thus, a few posts will be dedicated to the origins and methods to produce this well-known product.
Traditionally and historically yeasts are associated with alcoholic fermentation. This can be well understood in face of the role of yeasts in the production of alcoholic beverages, like beer and wine.

Nanopacksafer - Safer food, happier consumer.

Imagine a natural layer evolving an apple. A layer that you can not see, that increases the apple's quality, durability and in the end it indicates if the apple if safe to eat. This new project, still in development, is the Nanopacksafer. Several universities from Portugal and Spain are in this project as the INL (Nanotechnology International Institute) situated in Braga, Portugal. The main ingredients of this product have a natural source. For example polysaccharides extracted from leguminous plants, specifically from it's seeds, or chitosan form shellfish shells. It is expected that this field of business, packages for food industry, reaches the market value of 20 billions of dollars in 2012. The principal investigator of this project is Dr. José Teixeira professor in Biological Engineering at University of Minho and principal investigator of several other projects. If you want to know more take a look in this presentation from one of the co-workers in this project. Additionally read the characteristics of the project here.