The sources and transmission routes of microbial populations throughout a meat processing facility

Abstract

Microbial food spoilage is responsible for a considerable amount of waste and can cause food-borne diseases in humans, particularly in immunocompromised individuals and children. Therefore, preventing microbial food spoilage is a major concern for health authorities, regulators, consumers, and the food industry.However, the contamination of food products is difficult to control because there are several potential sources during production, processing, storage, distribution, and consumption, where microorganisms come in contact with the product. Here, we conduct the first study that uses high-throughput full-length 16S rRNA gene sequencing to provide novel insights into bacterial community structure throughout a pork processing plant. Specifically, we investigated what proportion of bacteria on meat are not animal-associated and are therefore transferred during cutting via personnel, equipment, machines, or the slaughter environment. We then created a facility-specific transmission map of bacterial flow which revealed previously unknown sources of bacterial contamination. This allowed us to pinpoint specific taxa to particular environmental sources and provide the facility with essential information for targeted disinfection. For example, Moraxella spp., a prominent meat spoilage organism which was one of the most abundant amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) detected on the meat, was most likely transferred from the gloves of employees, a railing at the classification step, and the polishing tunnel whips. Finally, we provide evidence that 1000 sequences per sample provides a reasonable sequencing depth for microbial source tracking in food processing, suggesting that this approach could be implemented in regular monitoring systems. BackgroundAs the world population is expected to rise to 9.8 billion by 2050, the global demand for food will increase by approximately 70 % in order to satisfy human needs. Resolving this issue, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting valuable ecosystems is one of the greatest challenges of our era. Food security experts estimate that 46 % of the required additional food demand can be achieved by increasing food production, whereas the remaining proportion needs to be attained through sustaining the productive capacity (34 %) and better food demand management (20 %) (Keating et al.

Metataxonomic insights in the distribution ofLactobacillaceaein foods and food environments

“…Starting from version 4.1, FoodMicrobionet includes, as an external resource (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6954040), R lists containing the ASV for all studies processed using the dada2 pipeline (Parente et al, 2022). Although the ecological significance of ASV is not clear (i.e., there is no convincing proof that they represent different subpopulations within a taxonomic group) they have been used to evaluate microdiversity in some studies (Quijada et al, 2018; Skeie et al, 2019; Zwirzitz et al, 2020). Their main advantage, however, is that results from different studies can be compared, something which is impossible when using Operational Taxonomic Units (Callahan et al, 2017).…”

Driving forces shaping the microbial ecology in meat packing plants

“…We also analyzed the bacteria in these samples (n = 439), which were from conveyor belts, equipment surfaces, knives, aprons, gloves, etc. (Supplementary Table S3) in plants in Austria, USA, Italy, and Canada (Yang et al, 2016;Botta et al, 2020;Zwirzitz et al, 2020Zwirzitz et al, , 2021Shedleur-Bourguignon et al, 2023; Supplementary Table S2). Like after-cleaning samples, three bacterial genera including Pseudomonas (9.7%), Psychrobacter (9.6%), and Acinetobacter (6.2%) also had average relative abundance of >5% in before-cleaning samples (Supplementary Table S4).…”

Microbiological quality of sous vide beef after application of vegetable oils and pathogenic bacteria

“…Cieľom našej práce bolo sledovanie mikrobiologickej kontaminácie sous vide hovädzieho mäsa po aplikácii rozmarínovej rastlinnej silice v kombinácii s baktériou S. (Sarantópoulos et al, 2002). Výsledkom je anaeróbne prostredie, ktoré predlžuje trvanlivosť hovädzieho mäsa počas prepravy (Zwirzitz et al, 2019). Kaziace baktérie na hovädzom mäse však prispievajú k zmenám v štruktúre mäsa, farbe a chuti, čo ho robí neprijateľným pre ľudskú spotrebu (Mills et al, 2014).…”