Vision: A world where everyone, everywhere is food secure
Stasiewicz Food Safety LaboratoryAbstract Commercial leafy greens customers often require a negative preharvest pathogen test, typically by compositing 60 produce sample grabs of 150 to 375 g total mass from lots of various acreages. This study developed a preharvest sampling Monte Carlo simulation, validated it against literature and experimental trials, and used it to suggest improvements to sampling […]
Abstract Right now, many concerned parents are probably thinking, how could Cronobacter sakazakii get through the powdered infant formula (PIF) production system? Shouldn’t a food safety monitoring system find such a serious problem? Aren’t those products tested before arriving on shelves? And the very challenging answer is yes, these products were likely tested with a standardized sampling and […]
Highlights Abstract Aflatoxin and fumonisin contamination distribution in corn is non-homogeneous. Therefore, bulk sample testing may not accurately represent the levels of contamination. Single kernel analysis could provide a solution to these problems and lead to remediation strategies such as sorting. Our study uses extensive single kernel aflatoxin (AF) and fumonisin (FM) measurements to (i) demonstrate skewness, calculate weighted sums […]
Abstract Probe sampling plans for aflatoxin in corn attempt to reliably estimate concentrations in bulk corn given complications like skewed contamination distribution and hotspots. To evaluate and improve sampling plans, three sampling strategies (simple random sampling, stratified random sampling, systematic sampling with U.S. GIPSA sampling schemes), three numbers of probes (5, 10, 100, the last […]
Highlights Abstract Ready-to-eat meat products, such as deli ham, can support the growth of Listeria monocytogenes (LM), which can cause severe illness in immunocompromised individuals. The objectives of this study were to validate a miniature ham model (MHM) against the ham slice method and to screen antimicrobial combinations to control LM on ham by using response surface […]
Abstract Food waste is increasingly scrutinized due to the projected need to feed nine billion people in 2050. Food waste squanders many natural resources and occurs at all stages of the food supply chain, but economic and environmental costs are highest at later stages due to value and resource addition throughout the supply chain. Food recovery is the […]
Abstract While complex sample pooling strategies have been developed for large-scale experiments with robotic liquid handling, many medium-scale experiments like mycotoxin screening by Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) are still conducted manually in 48- and 96-well plates. At this scale, the opportunity to save on reagent costs is offset by the increased costs of labor, materials, […]
Abstract Current detection methods for contamination of aflatoxin and fumonisin used in the corn industry are based on bulk level. However, literature demonstrates that contamination of these mycotoxins is highly skewed and bulk samples do not always represent accurately the overall contamination in a batch of corn. Single kernel analysis can provide an insightful level […]
Abstract The foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes causes the potentially lethal disease listeriosis. Within food-associated environments, L. monocytogenes can persist for long periods and increase the risk of contamination by continued presence in processing facilities or other food-associated environments. Most research on phenotyping of persistent L. monocytogenes’ has explored biofilm formation and sanitizer resistance, with less data examining persistent L. monocytogenes’ phenotypic […]
Abstract The foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes can persist in food-associated environments for long periods. To identify persistent strains, the subtyping method pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) is being replaced by whole genome sequence (WGS)-based subtyping. It was hypothesized that analyzing specific mobile genetic elements, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Short Repeat) spacer arrays, extracted from […]