Rapid and reliable enrichment-based detection of foodborne pathogens

Testing of foods for the presence of pathogens is crucial to ensure food safety and is done by food industry and governmental authorities. Currently, due to low level contamination and the conceivable presence of preservation-induced damaged cells, the international standard procedures for microbiological testing of foods include enrichments that are time-consuming and not always reliable, followed by culturing-based detection and identification steps. Attempts to shorten microbiological testing of foods have mainly focused on development of rapid molecularbased detection and identification methods, but also these methods rely on the poorly explored pre-enrichment step to amplify damaged pathogens to higher levels allowing subsequent detection. Therefore, this project will investigate the microbial physiology and ecology during enrichment to unravel critical metabolic processes involved in damage repair and growth initiation and to get insight in microbial dynamics. This will provide solid directions to optimize enrichment media formulations to promote damage repair and growth initiation of the target pathogens and shorten enrichment-based test procedures without forfeiting reliability.