Application of real-time PCR to detect Listeria monocytogenes in a mussel processing industry: Impact on control

Listeria monocytogenes in foods-From culture identification to whole-genome characteristics

Listeria monocytogenes is an important foodborne pathogen, which is able to persist in the food production environments. The presence of these bacteria in different niches makes them a potential threat for public health. In the present review, the current information on the classical and alternative methods used for isolation and identification of L. monocytogenes in food have been described. Although these techniques are usually simple, standardized, inexpensive, and are routinely used in many food testing laboratories, several alternative molecular-based approaches for the bacteria detection in food and food production environments have been developed. They are characterized by the high sample throughput, a short time of analysis, and cost-effectiveness. However, these methods are important for the routine testing toward the presence and number of L. monocytogenes, but are not suitable for characteristics and typing of the bacterial isolates, which are crucial in the study of listeriosis infections. For these purposes, novel approaches, with a high discriminatory power to genetically distinguish the strains during epidemiological studies, have been developed, e.g., whole-genome sequence-based techniques such as NGS which provide an opportunity to perform comparison between strains of the same species. In the present review, we have shown a short description of the principles of microbiological, alternative, and modern methods of detection of L. monocytogenes in foods and characterization of the isolates for epidemiological purposes. According to our knowledge, similar comprehensive papers on such subject have not been recently published, and we hope that the current review may be interesting for research communities.

Naked-eye detection strategies coupled with isothermal nucleic acid amplification techniques for the detection of human pathogens

Nucleic acid amplification-based techniques have gained acceptance by the scientific, and general, community as reference methodologies for many different applications. Since the development of the gold standard of these techniques, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), back in the 1980s many improvements have been made, and alternative techniques emerged reporting improvements over PCR. Among these, isothermal amplification approaches resulted of particular interest as could overcome the need of specialized equipment to accurately control temperature changes, but it was after year 2000 that these techniques have flourished in a huge number of novel alternatives with many different degrees of complexities and requirements. An added value is their possibility to be combined with many different naked-eye detection strategies, simplifying the resources needed, allowing to reduce cost, and serving as the basis for novel developments of lab-on-chip systems, and miniaturized devices, for point-of-care testing. In this review, we will go over different types of naked-eye detection strategies, combined with isothermal amplification. This will provide the readers up-to-date information for them to select the most appropriate strategies depending on the particular needs and resources for their experimental setup.