Companies seek food safety using a microbiome approach

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In a pet food factory in Reno, NV, researchers from IBM Research and Mars, Inc. are conducting an experiment that may someday revolutionize food safety. For more than two years, they’ve taken regular samples of poultry meal—a protein-rich mash of chicken parts—as it enters the factory on its way to becoming pet food. Each sample of this raw material contains a vast community of living bacteria and viruses—the poultry meal’s microbiome—that either originated with the chicken parts or entered at some point along the food processing chain. The researchers then use genetic sequencing to determine the identity and relative quantities of each microbial species. Researchers with the Consortium for Sequencing the Food Supply Chain ultimately want to explore the microbiomes of food in each stage of the supply chain—from the farm, to the factory, to the supermarket. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Alf Ribeiro. The hypothesis is that safe batches of poultry meal all have a fairly standard set of microbial residents. A shift in the microbiome, then, could signify that something is amiss—a pathogen has spiked, a toxin is present, or the item labeled poultry is actually from another animal altogether. By routinely sampling the microbiome of this raw pet food material, researchers could pinpoint and stop safety issues before the food leads to sick pets. And if a microbiome surveillance approach works for poultry meal, it might just work for the rest of the food supply. But if the approach is ever to replace more traditional food surveillance methods, the team must categorize a vast amount of bacterial diversity. Food suppliers and government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), regularly monitor food in the production chain to limit the spread of foodborne illnesses. And yet, roughly 48 million Americans get …