SBIR Phase I: Polymeric Amplification for Rapid Listeria Monocytogenes Detection

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目旨在展示如何将一种全新的技术应用于食源性病原体的实时检测。目前的即食食品检验测试方法需要3-6天，因为需要使致病人群丰富到可以检测到的程度。在这段时间里，食物被储存起来，等待检测结果。这种方法需要额外的费用和资源来存储和跟踪测试批次，并将市场保质期缩短多达一周。利用所提出的方法，病原体检测可以作为食品加工工作流程的一部分实时完成。这是可能的，因为一项创新技术涉及使用专有的放大聚合物，大大放大检测事件。这种聚合物已被证明可以检测无机化合物的亚飞图质量。在拟议的研究中，鉴定李斯特菌的成熟方法将与扩增聚合物耦合，从而产生高度敏感的检测机制，从而消除了培养富集培养物的需要。该项目的直接商业应用将是检查受李斯特菌污染的即食食品。该系统的低成本和便利性将吸引工厂内的质量控制检查员、政府监管机构和机构用户。基本传感器平台的更广泛应用将是在实验室和一般环境中检测其他食源性病原体和病原释放。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to demonstrate how a radically new technology can be applied to real-time detection of food-borne pathogens. Current ready-to-eat food inspection test methods require 3-6 days due to the need to enrich the pathogenic population to the point to make them detectable. During this time, the food is stored, awaiting the results of the tests. This method necessitates additional expenses and resources to store and track the tested lots and reduces the market shelf-life by as much as a week. With the proposed approach, detection of pathogens can be done in real-time as part of the food processing work flow. This is possible because of an innovative technology involving the use of a proprietary amplifying polymer that greatly amplifies detection events. This polymer has been shown to detect subfemtogram masses of inorganic compounds. In the proposed research, proven methods of identifying Listeria will be coupled to the amplifying polymer, resulting in a highly sensitive detection mechanism that will eliminate the need to grow enriched cultures.The immediate commercial application of this project will be for the inspection of ready-to-eat foods that are subject to Listeria contamination. The low cost and convenience of the system will be attractive to in-plant quality control inspectors, government regulators and institutional users. The broader applications of the basic sensor platform would be for detection of other food borne pathogens and of pathogenic releases in laboratories and in the general environment.