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Imprint
Enterobacterales as hygiene indicators in meat production
Project
Project code: MRI-FL-23-2025-32
Contract period: 01.09.2025
- 31.08.2027
Purpose of research: Experimental development
The slaughtering and cutting of animals can lead to damage to the intestinal walls and thus to contamination of meat and infrastructure (equipment and facilities) with intestinal bacteria from the animal. As a rule, the infrastructure is cleaned as planned in production facilities using various approved decontamination agents and the success of germ count reduction is checked using selective media. Selective components of the media suppress the growth of bacterial groups in mixed cultures in order to be able to quantify individual target groups. However, these components also have the side effect of suppressing not only the growth of undesirable microorganism groups, but also, to varying degrees, those whose detection is desired. In addition, it has been known for some time in the scientific literature that decontamination agents can induce the so-called viable but non-culturable (VBNC) state in bacteria, in which bacteria have only very low metabolic activity but can no longer be cultivated. As a result, bacteria in the VBNC state, including Enterobacterales, are not detected by conventional microbiological methods of bacterial count determination. Against this background, it seems reasonable to develop a real-time PCR for the group-specific quantitative rapid detection of Enterobacterales serving as an indicator of the hygiene status of production lines as well as for the products itself. According to a recent taxonomic reorganization, Enterobacterales actually consists of 8 families and over 449 acknowledged species. The aim is to include as many of the meat-relevant Enterobacterales species as possible (previous experience of our institute). In a second step, real samples from the Kulmbach abattoir (research partner) will be examined using both cultivation-based standard methods and the new quantitative real-time PCR.
Section overview
Subjects
- Biotechnology
- Food microbiology
- Toxicology
Framework programme
Funding programme
Excutive institution
MRI - Institute for Foods of Animal Origin - Kulmbach (MRI-TL)
