Abstract
Food-processing facilities harbor a wide diversity of microorganisms that persist and interact in multispecies biofilms, which could provide an ecological niche for pathogens to better colonize and gain tolerance against sanitization. Biofilm formation by foodborne pathogens is a serious threat to food safety and public health. Biofilms are formed in an environment through synergistic interactions within the microbial community through mutual adaptive response to their long-term coexistence. Mixed-species biofilms are more tolerant to sanitizers than single-species biofilms or their planktonic equivalents. Hence, there is a need to explore how multispecies biofilms help in protecting the foodborne pathogen from common sanitizers and disseminate biofilm cells from hotspots and contaminate food products. This knowledge will help in designing microbial interventions to mitigate foodborne pathogens in the processing environment. As the global need for safe, high-quality, and nutritious food increases, it is vital to study foodborne pathogen behavior and engineer new interventions that safeguard food from contamination with pathogens. This review focuses on the potential food safety issues associated with biofilms in the food-processing environment.
Highlights
With the recent shift in studying microorganisms as a mixed community, there has been a surge of research focusing on biofilms and cell–cell communication, sparking the importance of examining multispecies systems and their combined metabolic properties [4–8]
A recent report [107] showed that compared to the diversity control panel strains, High Event Period” (HEP) E. coli O157:H7 strains overall retained significantly higher copy number of the pO157 plasmid, and a positive correlation was observed among the high plasmid copy number, strong biofilm forming ability, low sanitizer susceptibility, and high survival/recovery capability of the biofilm cells after sanitization
Understanding how foodborne pathogens are protected and released into the food-processing environment from biofilms will lead to new knowledge on sanitizer tolerance and recurrent contamination
Summary
Our understanding of the microbial world has evolved from single-species existence to highly complex and diverse microbial communities [1,2]. Biofilms are complex communities that are anchored to a substratum and are enveloped in an extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) matrix [9,10]. Biofilm formation is highly variable among different microorganisms, adding complexity in understanding the mechanism of biofilm formation [10,13,14]. In food-processing environments, biofilms have been a major cause for food spoilage associated economic losses and food safety issues leading to number of outbreaks [16–19]. In the food industry, owing to high risk of food safety and spoilage involving the persistence of biofilm, research has been directed towards better understating of biofilm formation, interventions, and approaches to mitigate them. The aim of this review is to discuss the potential food safety issues associated with biofilms in the food-processing environment
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