Rapid testing techniques - food

[student71]

Hi all

Could anyone point me in the direction of some 'easy, step-by-step' web pages that explain techniques such as PCR, ELISA etc. with regard to food testing. Although I have notes on the techniques I am struggling a little with the general understanding of how they work.

Many thanks.

[JorgeLobo]

go to FoodQuality.com and search fr rapid methods. This is a techncical journal flor food quality.

[student71]

Many thanks for your reply, however they seem to be articles that briefly mention the various tests available but I am more interested in exactly how they work so if you have any other ideas of where to look, I would be grateful.

[BDeis]

This link is a good start.

http://www.foodsafety.gov/~ebam/bam-a1.html

I work in a lab that does this.
Basically, samples are taken in a quanity that would give us a good represenitation of the entire lot of product. We would then incubate the food in a E. coli / Salmonella specific media for 8 hours. This would give us a log10(4) increase in growth We would then run both PCR and elisia on the product. Our Elisa (lateral flow) test were basically home pregnancy tests. Here is a link to a product description.

http://www2.dupont.com/Qualicon/en_US/p ... ecoli.html

You would add an aliquot of the incubated media. The test containes antibodies on it for a the E.coli RFB protien and it will produce a red line if it is present

During PCR we would look specific Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli genes. Let me know if you have any other questions. I was a little vauge here because some ot he PCR methods my company uses are proprietary.