Bacterial Pathogens in Food: Modern Safety Criteria and Methods of Molecular Genetic Analysis.

Abstract

The review is devoted to the issues of improving the food biosafety system by developing and implementing modern methods of microbiological and molecular genetic analysis and new safety standards for the main groups of food products. The results of fundamental and applied microbiological research in the field of food safety conducted by the Federal Research Center for Nutrition and Biotechnology are presented. We demonstrated the necessity of a detailed study of the ecology and features of survival of new types of pathogenic microorganisms and evaluation of the role of technological factors in the formation of altered properties of these pathogens in food production environment. It is noted that the most effective basis for establishing criteria for biosafety of food products is the use of a structural model of microbiological risk analysis (MRA), which implies assessment and integration of risks throughout the food chain and step-by-step study of microbial hazards, predicts the degree of danger to the health of certain foods contaminated by them and the risk and severity of adverse effects. Consideration of the variability of pathogens and the ability of MRA to forecast allows rationalizing resources in the most relevant areas when developing measures to protect the population. It is shown how, as a result of studying the biology of pathogenic bacteria of the genera Campylobacter, Salmonella, Cronobacter, and Listeria and mechanisms for regulating the expression of pathogenicity and resistance factors of these pathogens, improved schemes and modified methods have been developed over a number of years, allowing accelerated indication of pathogens in food products using combined schemes of bacteriological and molecular genetic analysis based on the selection of the most informative biochemical and immunological tests, and their genotyping. Accumulated scientific data in the field of biosafety indicate the need for further research in the prediction of the pathogen behavior in food, studying the mechanisms of regulation of the expression of pathogenicity genes in food-borne pathogens, the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes, and studying the interaction of the human with pathogens to calculate the biological response to microbial agents coming from food.