No abstract

Feeding raw‐meat‐based diets to companion animals has become a widespread practice, and many owners are now accustomed to buying frozen ingredients online. The goals of this study were to assess the microbiological quality of raw‐meat dog foods obtained from specialized websites and to evaluate the effects of storage at different temperatures for a few days. Twenty‐nine raw dog food products were processed for quantitative bacteriology (i.e. total viable count, TVC; Escherichia coli; faecal coliforms, FC) and sulphite‐reducing clostridia, and analysed for the presence of Salmonella spp., Listeria monocytogenes, Yersinia enterocolitica and Clostridium difficile. Every sample was examined right after the delivery (T0), after 24 to 48 hr and after 72 hr, both at 2°C and 7°C. At T0, the mean score for the TVC was 5.9 × 106 cfu/g (SD = 4.8 × 107 cfu/g), while those for E. coli and FC were 1.1 × 104 cfu/g (SD = 2.5 × 105 cfu/g) and 3.3 × 103 cfu/g (SD = 6.5 × 104 cfu/g) respectively. The samples stored at 2°C had a significant increase of all parameters (TVC: p < .01; E. coli: p = .03; FC: p = .04) through time. Noteworthy differences between the analyses performed at 2°C and 7°C were found for TVC (p < .01), being the samples considerably more contaminated at higher temperatures. No sample tested positive for Salmonella spp., while L. monocytogenes was isolated from 19 products, Y. enterocolitica from three products and Clostridium perfringens and C. difficile from four and six products respectively. The microbiological quality of raw‐meat dog foods sold online appears to be poor, carrying considerable amounts of potentially zoonotic bacteria and reaching greater levels of bacterial contaminations if not kept at proper refrigeration temperatures and fed soon after defrosting.

No abstract

GenBank files contain genomic data of sequenced living organisms. Here, we present GBRAP (GenBank Retrieving, Analyzing and Parsing software), a tool written in Python 3 that can be used to easily download, parse and analyze viral and bacterial GenBank files, even when contain more than one genomic sequence for each species. GBRAP can analyze more files simultaneously through single command line parameters that give as output a single table showing the genomic characteristics of each organism. It is also able to calculate Shannon, LZSS (Lempel Ziv Storer Szymanski) and topological entropy for both the entire genome and its constitutive elements such as genes, rRNAs, tRNAs, tmRNAs and ncRNAs together with Chargaff's second parity rule scores obtained using different mathematical methods. Moreover, GBRAP can calculate, the number, the length and the nucleotides abundance of genomic components for each DNA strand and for the overlapping regions among the two complementary helixes. To our knowledge, this is the only software capable of providing this type of genomic analyses all together in a single tool, that, therefore can be used by the scientists interested in both genomics and evolutionary research.

The ‘nduja is one of the most typical and appreciated Calabrian raw seasoned sausages. As well as other Calabrian meat products, the ‘nduja contains a high quantity of hot red chilli pepper. The ‘nduja is a seasoned, very savoury but yet spreadable sausage; it is traditionally spread on bread or used as natural flavour enhancer of pasta, pizza and other similar kind of food. 27 samples of ‘nduja were sampled, 15 coming from artisanal production and the remaining 12 from industrial production, in order to establish if they were differences between the two kind of production from the hygienic point of view. The samples were stored up to 6 month and analyzed at 1 day of storage and then at 3 and 6 month of storage. Our results show that the ‘nduja is a meat product of good hygienic quality; the sausages made in artisanal manner showed a more variable microbial quality as the ones made in industrial factories. The microbial flora of ‘nduja is mainly composed by lactobacilli, yeasts and moulds; only in rare cases we have found quite high numbers of micrococci and/od pseudomonads. Total and faecal coliforms are in general very low, in the product ready to eat. No Salmonella enterica nor Listeria monocytogenes nor enterotoxigenic strains of S. aureus or B. cereus were found in the samples analysed