Farmscape for August 17, 2006  (Episode 2222)

A University of Guelph food science professor says the same genetic technology that's used to identify crime victims on television is also being used to identify the pathogens in food that can make us sick.

New molecular methods for identifying the foodborne organisms that can cause illness are proving themselves to be faster, easier and more reliable than the conventional cultural based methods they're gradually replacing.

Dr. Mansel Griffiths, the director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph says techniques that have been used in clinical microbiology for a long time are now being applied in the food industry.

Clip-Dr. Mansel Griffiths-University of Guelph

The one that's being used with increasing frequency is a technique called real time PCR, real time polymerase chain reaction.

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR), we are all familiar with programs like CSI and similar programs, so PCR is the technique that they use to amplify the DNA that they find at crime scenes for instance.

It's a way of making many copies of a target piece of DNA that we know is unique to the organism that we're looking for.

The real time part of it means we can detect whether the gene sequence, the DNA sequence that we're interested in is being amplified in real time.

As it's being amplified we can detect the products of the amplification reaction.

Dr. Griffiths notes there's a variety of methods available but the ones that are being used increasingly are the real time PCR methods.

He adds, while PCR techniques have been around for awhile, the actual application to pathogen detection in the food industry has not been around as long.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council