Development and validation of rapid point of care food safety assays for Salmonella and Campylobacter - Rapid detection facilitated by CRISPR

该项目将探索和创造一个重大公共卫生问题的解决方案，影响成千上万的人。 对加拿大的农业和食品加工业产生了重大影响。这个问题是在食品生产和加工过程中，在食品受到主要细菌病原体污染的情况下确保食品安全。这对消费者、农业和政府来说都是一个重要问题，因为不安全的食品生产和消费每天都使数千人的生命和数十亿美元处于危险之中。我们的目标是开发和验证强大，可靠和易于使用的生产点检测试剂盒，以检测沙门氏菌和弯曲杆菌，这两种重要的细菌通常会导致食源性疾病，在食品样品以及食品加工和制备设备和设施。我们将利用我们团队在微生物学、食品和药物安全以及检测开发和验证方面的独特专业知识，通过利用新的基因编辑技术CRISPR来快速检测这些难以检测的细菌，从而创建新颖、快速和可靠的检测方法。加拿大卫生部、美国农业部和食品药品监督管理局将对这项研究开发的检测试剂盒进行评估和验证，以便将这些加拿大制造的检测试剂盒从实验室迅速转移到北美食品生产和供应链的500多个食品安全实验室，提高所有加拿大人的食品安全。提高加拿大出口食品的能力，加强加拿大的生物技术产业，为加拿大人提供就业和机会。 工人

This project will explore and create solutions to a major public health problem, impacting thousands of Canadians yearly and having substantial effects on Canada's agricultural and food processing industry. This problem is ensuring food safety in the context of contamination of food by major bacterial pathogens during the process of food production and processing. This is an important issue to consumers, the agricultural industry and government as thousands of lives and billions of dollars are at risk every day due to unsafe food production and consumption. Our objective is to develop and validate robust, reliable and easy to use point-of-production assays kits to detect Salmonella and Campylobacter, two important species of bacteria that commonly cause food-borne illness, in food samples as well as on food processing and preparation equipment and facilities. We will use the unique expertise of our team in microbiology, food and drug safety and assay development and validation to create novel, rapid and reliable assays by taking advantage of new gene editing technology known as CRISPR to rapidly detect these difficult to detect bacteria. The assays developed as a result of this research will be evaluated and validated by Health Canada and the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to rapidly move these Canadian-made assay kits from the laboratory into more than 500 food safety laboratories across the integrated North American food production and supply chain, enhancing the safety of food for all Canadians, improving Canada's ability to export food and also strengthening Canada's biotechnology industry and providing employment and opportunity to Canadian workers.