Abstract

CURRENT TRENDS USED IN DIAGNOSIS OF FOOD BORNE PATHOGENS

Pranjali Yadav and Anjana Pandey*

Abstract

Food borne pathogens have become a major concern worldwide as they cause several diseases such as diarrhea, stomach infection, food borne botulism, gastrointestinal infection, etc. The diagnosis of these pathogens is a global health goal and the food borne diseases lead a major crisis on health. There are many conventional methods devised for the same purpose but these methods are very time consuming and may take several days to few weeks to confirm the result. Traditional methods to detect food borne bacteria often rely on time-consuming growth in culture media, followed by isolation, biochemical identification, and sometimes serology. Hence, research is being carried out to improve the rapidness, sensitivity and selectivity for the detection of food borne pathogens. These new methods are often referred to as "rapid methods", a subjective term used loosely to describe a vast array of tests that includes miniaturized biochemical kits, antibody- and DNA-based tests, and assays that are modifications of conventional tests to speed up analysis. But these methods should be cost effective in nature and user friendly. This review paper focuses on all the conventional methods, immunological methods, PCR based methods, molecular based approaches and recent trends being used for the detection, identification and quantification of the food borne pathogens.

Keywords: Food borne pathogen, food borne pathogen detection, conventional methods, immunological methods.