Use of Omic Technologies to Develop Strategies to Control Escherichia coli from Farm to Table
Teresa M. Bergholz and Manoj K. Shah
from: Pathogenic Escherichia coli: Evolution, Omics, Detection and Control (Edited by: Pina M. Fratamico, Yanhong Liu and Christopher H. Sommers). Caister Academic Press, U.K. (2018) Pages: 207-228.
Abstract
The food supply is a series of complex environments which can pose a number of stresses to microbes. These stresses include intrinsic stresses inherent to a given food, such as pH and water activity. These stresses also include extrinsic factors that can vary during each step of food harvesting and processing, including temperature and relative humidity, as well as stresses specific to food processing. Bacteria possess a wide range of strategies to adapt to changing environmental conditions in order to survive under suboptimal conditions. These stress responses can be complex, involving activation of regulatory networks and cascades of gene and protein expression. Omics technologies allowing for the measurement of global changes in gene or protein expression, or changes in the metabolome, can provide insights into the molecular mechanisms that a bacterium utilizes to adapt to different environmental stresses. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the available data assessing global changes in Shiga-toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) that facilitate our understanding of how this pathogen adapts to stresses presented at different stages of food production, with the goal of using these insights to develop control measures that will effectively reduce the presence of this pathogen in foods read more ...
