Molecular quantification of Campylobacter jejuni in frozen chicken carcasses

• Grant number: 13/14412-9
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2013
• End date: May 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Food Science and Technology - Food Science
• Principal Investigator: Valéria Christina Amstalden Junqueira
• Grantee: Valéria Christina Amstalden Junqueira
• Host Institution: Instituto de Tecnologia de Alimentos (ITAL). Agência Paulista de Tecnologia dos Agronegócios (APTA). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• City of the host institution: Campinas
• Associated researchers: Fernando Leite Hoffmann ; Héctor Abel Palacios Cabrera ; Margarete Midori Okazaki ; Maristela da Silva Do Nascimento ; Neusely da Silva

Abstract

Campylobacteriosis is one of foodborne illness more frequent in the world, it is caused mainly by species of thermotolerant Campylobacter spp., especially C. jejuni subsp. jejuni, known as C. jejuni, and has chicken meat as the main vehicle of transmission. According to the literature, a comparative evaluation of methods for the quantification of micro-organism is necessary because of the difficulty there is in the recovery of the microorganism for isolation and enumeration. Moreover, we emphasize that there is a tiny number of studies on the subject, thus missing data needed to prepare a risk assessment and information showing the Brazilian reality. Thus, this project aims to comparatively evaluate the performance of different methods for the enumeration of C. jejuni in chicken carcasses. We will analyze 80 samples of the same by means of one sampling, skin whole carcass, detecting quantitatively the micro-organism culture by the method ISO 10272-2:2006 (reference method) and real-time qPCR with and without addition of propidium monoazide (PMA) for enumeration of viable cells (AU)