The consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables has increased in the recent years. With the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, there is a rapid increase in food borne illnesses. According to food borne and illness outbreak database, strawberries are the second main produce in USA that is associated with the outbreak of many pathogenic diseases. Therefore, this research study mainly focusses on identifying human pathogens on fresh strawberries after long term storage. For this study, fully mature strawberries were collected from U-pick farms and inoculated with bacterial species such as Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella typhimurium and Listeria monocytogenes and stored at 4°C for 6-7 weeks. Extracts from these storage strawberries were collected and detected for the presence of microbial populations through direct spreading and enrichment methods. As none of the inoculated microbial species were recovered from these extracts, western blot analysis was done to detect the bacterial antigens. Supernatant from these strawberry extracts is collected by centrifuging the sample and purified by following dialysis and 2-D purification methods. Antigens of the respective inoculated bacterial species were detected against the commercially available polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies. These experiments confirmed the presence of bacterial antigens even after long term storage.
展开▼
