Don’t Shut the Stable Door after the Phage Has Bolted—The Importance of Bacteriophage Inactivation in Food Environments

Abstract

In recent years, a new potential measure against foodborne pathogenic bacteria was rediscovered—bacteriophages. However, despite all their advantages, in connection to their widespread application in the food industry, negative consequences such as an uncontrolled phage spread as well as a development of phage resistant bacteria can occur. These problems are mostly a result of long-term persistence of phages in the food production environment. As this topic has been neglected so far, this article reviews the current knowledge regarding the effectiveness of disinfectant strategies for phage inactivation and removal. For this purpose, the main commercial phage products, as well as their application fields are first discussed in terms of applicable inactivation strategies and legal regulations. Secondly, an overview of the effectiveness of disinfectants for bacteriophage inactivation in general and commercial phages in particular is given. Finally, this review outlines a possible strategy for users of commercial phage products in order to improve the effectiveness of phage inactivation and removal after application.

An Optimized Bacteriophage Cocktail Can Effectively Control Salmonella in vitro and in Galleria mellonella

“…However, because at ambient conditions or higher temperatures antibiotics efficacy diminishes with time, multiple applications are needed to sustain an effective dose to control a growing bacterial population ( Mackowiak et al, 1982 ; Paterson et al, 2016 ). In contrast, phages are biological entities, and have been shown to be more stable in various pHs, biotic environments and in ambient conditions than antibiotics ( Ahmadi et al, 2017 ; Sommer et al, 2019 ). In addition to stability, phages replicate and produce increasing infective particles in the presence of target bacterial pathogen, hence ensuring continuous dosage supply (auto-dosing) of anti-infectives at infection sites ( Jończyk et al, 2011 ; Loc-Carrillo and Abedon, 2011 ).…”

Food safety lessons learned from the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Phages are attractive surrogates because of the low potential impact on human health and easy propagation. Phages are commonly used as surrogates to study highly pathogenic viruses in which the quantification of the viruses is hard to approach or the lack of equipment with sufficient biosafety level to conduct the experiment (Sommer et al, 2019). However, phages and human pathogenic viruses have fundamentally different structures.…”

Bacteriophages as Potential Tools for Detection and Control of Salmonella spp. in Food Systems

“…Phages are thus shown as cheap, fast, sensitive, selective, and specific tools for detecting bacteria [31]. From a therapeutic viewpoint, phage therapy provides many benefits over chemotherapy, since phages are active against antibiotic-resistant bacteria and no side effect occurs during phage treatment [32].…”