Food Safety Testing with Bacterial
Vigilantes: Bacteriocins
By Alex Rogers
Food safety is a topic that concerns
everyone. We all eat, thus we all should take into account the current state of
the food that goes on our forks and into our bodies. If you’re eating right
now, grab a forkful and take a look at your food. A real close look. Could
there be something else on there, besides what you’re intending to eat? Some
microscopic organism swimming through the mayonnaise in your potato salad?
Miniature bugs, impossible to see with the naked eye, living in luxury on the
surface of the beef in your fried rice?
Don’t get grossed out yet. Though
it’s true that a one hundred percent bacteria free food is impossible as
microorganisms exist everywhere (like the millions that colonize your skin and
gut as is), the bacteria that cause harm are generally well controlled by the food production industry anything
reaches your table. Generally, that is. The FDA displays recall
data on their website; a
list of foods pulled from the shelves every week to help prevent disease
outbreak. But not every potential pathogen is detected before it goes out on
the shelves or into the restaurants we visit, which is why events such as a
widespread Listeria outbreak of Blue Bell dairy products or the multi-state Chipotle catastrophe
in December of 2015 happened.
Why do these things occur? Most
likely it is due to a lack of manpower and time. It’s physically impossible to
check every every sample of food at food production companies. Even if it were
possible to do it all, you simply couldn’t test every sample to begin with as
then you’d have nothing left to sell. You could find negative results in all of
your products but the one positive that somehow snuck by can shut it all down.
Besides an inability to test every
company in the most thorough of manner, the other reason food products may go
out contaminated and then force a recall boils down to the methods we use to
make sure the product is safe. Numerous techniques used in the lab are
extremely dated, think decades old. We use agar plates: jelly like substances
that have been modified to select for the specific evil bacteria we try to
avoid like E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella,
or Listeria. But their precision is
lacking, often picking out similar, non-harmful bacteria in the process and
creating false positives, in addition to taking 5 – 7 days to get these final
results.
We have expensive equipment that can
break down the bacteria to its DNA and determine if the specific baddie is
present at this subcellular level by matching up specific fragments to past
data. Using this technique is much quicker than the agars mentioned above, but
also takes a good deal more training to accomplish correctly and generally
still relies on pre-enrichment or enrichment steps that allow the bacteria to
grow in their most favorable conditions.
However, the most problematic of
complications with the agars and the machines is that they just aren’t one
hundred percent perfect even when everything is going right. They can’t detect
bacteria below a certain number and that means a food sample contaminated with
just a few cells of Listeria can pass
inspection, go to the grocery store, experience exponential growth in colony
size, and then cause sickness in future buyers of the product.
Innovation really needs to take
place in the food safety field, all the way back to the first steps of just
determining if there is a safety concern to begin with. Most of the new
technology involves improving detection methods, the final step in a food
safety assessment of a product. It gets the emphasis because this is the result
we want: is the bacteria there or not? How much of it is there? Is this food
safe to consume? In the end, though, improving detection has its limits and
those limits are still the initial amount of bacteria present when that sample
gets checked. Additionally, when checking for the safety of the food product,
not only is the presence of bacteria important to know, but the type of
bacteria as well.
What’s being done to improve these
detection techniques then? A lot, actually. The most interesting of this new
technology uses a bacteria’s own structure against it: bacteriocins.
Bacteriocins are small bits of protein fragments isolated from bacteria and new research
has shown they can be very effective at grabbing ahold of bacteria and keeping
them in place to allow easy detection testing. How does it work? You coat a
surface, say a tube, with the bacteriocins, attach some electrical monitoring
device to the tube, and pass your food sample through the center. The
bacteriocins, claws reaching out into the liquid of the food sample, grab and
bind to the bacteria that passes by. These interactions create chemical changes
that translate into electrical changes that trigger the monitoring device, thus
alerting the watchful food microbiologist of the presence of the target
bacteria.
There are two important parts to this
method that make it invaluable in food safety testing. The first is the fact
that the bacteriocin’s binding ability is species specific. Certain
bacteriocins bind to certain bacteria and thus, if you’re seeing a reading,
that means not only is bacteria present, but specifically the bacteria you are
looking for. In addition, these chemical and electrical signals are detected at
any interaction. What does this mean? Just one interaction of bacteria with
bacteriocin will create a response, meaning detection can occur at
exceptionally low initial levels of contamination.
Is this technology being used now?
Unfortunately, no. A lot more testing needs to take place first. Results with
actual food samples have been spotty, in no small part because of the mentioned
complexity that comes with trying to tell if a food is safe or not. Not to
fear, the research is ongoing and food products will be made safer and will be
ensured at higher standards as time goes by. Food recalls and outbreaks may not
stop completely, but they can be reduced to an infrequent and rare state. Take
a deep breath, there are a lot of people whose one goal in life is to make sure
the food you are eating is safe. Now take that bite still sitting on your fork.
