Shumaila Naz Malik
Jinnah University for Women Karachi, Pakistan
Title: Development of a PCR-based rapid method for the detection of L. monocytogenes in food samples after enrichment steps
Biography
Biography: Shumaila Naz Malik
Abstract
Listeria monocytogenes is a Gram positive, facultative, and opportunistic pathogen causing food borne infections in humans worldwide. It causes major problems in immunocompromised individuals such as pregnant women, neonate and elderly. The old conventional methods for the identification of L. monocytogenes in foods are laborious, and require almost 3-5 days giving ready results. To overcome this problem we have demonstrated a fast, non-conventional, simple, sensitive and rapid Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)-based method by using the primers for prfA gene sequence for the detection of Listeria in food samples. Experiments were to observe the sensitivity of this primer in number of combinations. Optimization studies were conducted using milk samples spiked with different inoculum size and for different time intervals. It was observed that this method efficiently detects minimum contamination of Listeria as tested with spiked samples in around 14 hours. Comparable results were observed when this method was applied to detect Listeria in naturally contaminated samples along with conventional methods. The proposed method can be employed to detect Optimization studies in parallel to standard conventional methods.