No abstract

Microorganisms, regardless of whether pathogenic or not, may cause enormous economic losses due to adverse effects on human and animal health, or by damaging the quality of the agricultural and food products. Based on these effects, the development of prompt molecular methods and their involvement in the practical pathogen diagnostic diagnostics is more than actual. This paper is focused on the evaluation of easy-to-perform and highly budget-friendly, PCR-related DNA purification protocols for diagnostic purposes especially in water or similar simple matrices. The slight modifications of earlier described DNA isolation methods, which rely on chelate exchange resin and/or ethanol-sodium-based heat lysis, we reevaluated in comparison with a widely used commercial kit. The efficiency of DNA purification techniques was assessed from Gram-negative as well as Gram-positive bacteria and yeast using quantitative PCR. The effectivity of different methods tested may vary depending on the bacterial or yeast species in question. Nevertheless, in our hands, the chelate exchange resin-based methods were found to be the most robust and/or satisfying at least by an acceptable reproducibility rate. Our presented results support the potential of low-cost but still sensitive molecular microbe detection procedures consisting of only a few pipetting steps resulting in good reproducibility and the least possible environmental burden, serving as a good starting point for developments of matrix-specific processes and methods.

Meat products are important staple foodstuffs owing to their high protein, vitamin and mineral content. Meat plants do not only use traditional production technologies but also develop methods that preserve the nutritional value of meat or improve the texture and organoleptic features of meat products. These features play an important role in the consumer society. Consumers first meet the external features of meat and this experience influences their decisions. Our analyses compared a traditional and a new curing procedure. Besides organoleptic inspections, we analysed texture with a CT3 type Texture Analyser to obtain quantified information on the condition of meat samples in the various curing phases. We used our results to compare traditional and new curing procedures.