SBIR Phase I: Detection of Ecoli O157:H7 in Ground Beef

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable the reliable detection of food-borne pathogens in meats in 4 hours. The time savings will dramatically reduce holding costs for food manufacturers and bring food to consumers one day earlier through an improved food-safety test. The proposed technology will address the major bottleneck for rapid bacterial detection in food samples, which is not detection itself but rather the sample preparation step known as bacterial enrichment. In this step, the sample is incubated for 20 or more hours to allow the bacteria to multiply and reach detectable levels. Bacterial enrichment has been dubbed 'the 100-year problem in food-safety and microbiology,' and there is currently no alternative. The proposed project will enable food-safety monitoring tests at a lower cost, improving food safety, saving billions of dollars in recalls, and reducing holding costs of food production. Moreover, getting ground beef to retailers’ shelves a day earlier can reduce food waste in ground beef by an estimated 50%. Because beef is so energy-intensive to produce, this waste reduction would save trillions of gallons of water and prevent the release of billions of pounds of methane and greenhouse gases every year. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to explore translation of a unique microfiltration-based enrichment technology to separate and concentrate pathogens from ground beef. This will enable the detection of a single pathogenic bacterium in 4 hours, with a limit of detection consistent with regulatory guidelines. The proposed technology combines washing, microfiltration and sedimentation with the addition of chemical agents to separate and concentrate the bacteria from the sample. The research plan includes optimizing the conditions and chemicals to stabilize and subsequently digest protein aggregates in solution that are deleterious to the concentration of the bacteria; demonstrating the technical feasibility by consistently and reliably detecting 1 Colony Forming Unit (CFU) in 375 g of ground beef; and exploring the performance-cost trade space. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.