A new generation of food-borne pathogen detection based on ribosomal RNA

Abstract

Listeria and Salmonella detection assays for food and environmental surfaces that target ribosomal RNA (rRNA) have been developed. The large number of rRNA molecules in bacteria enabled the development of molecular assaysthat use enrichment times as short as 12 hours for Salmonella and 24 hours for Listeria.These assays run on a fully automatedmolecular pathogen detection system, which provides walk-away capability and produces 300 assay results in eight hours. Copyright © 2013 by Annual Reviews.