Abstract:
Milk and dairy products can harbor varieties of foodborne pathogens especially
Bacillus cereus, Escherichia coli, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., and Staphylococcus
aureus. A rapid method for simultaneous detection of five major foodborne pathogens in milk was
developed.
In this investigation, the combination of multiplex PCR (m-PCR) using specific genes
as targets and oligonucleotide array hybridization were performed to specifically detect dominant
foodborne pathogens in milk. The suitable probes for specific detection of five foodborne
pathogens were screened and selected using post-PCR labeled target regions. Target bacteria
including B. cereus, E. coli, L. monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., and S. aureus were used as
models for the evaluation of these combined methods. The hybridization signals of
non-radioactive labeling digoxigenin (DIG) incorporated into the PCR target regions were
observed by naked eyes.
M-PCR targeting the enterotoxin FM, uspA, prfA, fimY, and eap genes were
successfully used to detect B. cereus, E. coli, L. monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., and S. aureus,
respectively. The optimum concentrations of the primers in the m-PCR reaction were 0.04 μM
enterotoxin FM, 0.12 μM uspA, 0.16 μM prfA, 0.04 μM fimY, and 0.2 μM eap primers. The
expected PCR products of 513, 884, 398, 315, and 230 bp were detected from the specific
amplification of B. cereus, E. coli, L. monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., and S. aureus,
respectively. Cross amplification from non-target bacteria isolated from raw milk samples were
not detected. The target regions of m-PCR amplified products were purified, labeled, and used for
specific probe selection. After hybridization, the difference of hybridization patterns were
observed among isolated and reference strains of B. cereus and S. aureus. These results indicated
that their target regions should contained the variation of nucleotide sequences. Therefore, all
five probes of B. cereus and S. aureus were selected for further application step. For specific
detection of E. coli, L. monocytogenes, and Salmonella spp., high accuracy of specific probes,
including EC1-EC5 (33-100% accuracy), LM1-LM4 (12.5-100% accuracy) and SM1-SM3 (33-
100% accuracy), were selected for detection of E. coli, L. monocytogenes, and Salmonella spp.,
respectively.
For further works, optimization of the enrichment steps of all target bacteria from milk
sample will be performed. Then, the DNA target regions of each bacterium will be amplified by
m-PCR follow by hybridization with the suitable probes obtained from this work. Finally, the
developed method will be applied to detect multiple pathogens in milk sample. The accuracy and
sensitivity of the developed method will be measured.
Keywords