Rapid food screening technology benefits consumers and producers across U.S.

Two laboratories at New Mexico State University are helping the U.S. Food and Drug Administration safeguard the nation’s food supply.

Standard methods for detecting disease-causing organisms in food can take days. Rapid screening would benefit consumers and producers – but not if accuracy is sacrificed for speed.

That’s where the Food Safety Laboratory at NMSU’s Physical Science Laboratory comes in. The federally funded lab tests procedures and develops standards for rapid testing of food products.

“The FDA’s standard methods are highly accurate – they have to be,” said Myles Culbertson, a PSL project manager who oversees the lab’s operations. “But they are also relatively slow, typically, because it is relatively old technology.”

The FDA needs to know if the faster technologies are as accurate as their own, he said.

The lab has been getting good results with some new rapid procedures, said Willis Fedio, the microbiologist who runs the lab.

“For instance, identifying salmonella in a food sample typically takes six to nine days now,” Fedio said. “Some of the methods we’re working on take one day. Some DNA-based methods produce results in six or seven hours.”

From a public health standpoint, the benefits of rapid identification of contaminated foods are obvious. From the producer’s perspective, faster testing of a shipment that is not contaminated can mean getting a perishable product to market on time.

The lab’s job is to validate rapid testing methods, identify ways they can be improved, develop protocols for testing, and otherwise advance the technologies for identifying pathogens in foods.

Federal funding also supports PSL’s Counterterrorism Chemical Technologies Laboratory, established last year to develop and evaluate techniques for detecting toxins in food “which may or may not be intentionally placed,” Culbertson said.

It is a challenging task, because “a particular toxin will show up differently in different foods,” he said.

Using mass spectroscopy and other techniques, the lab develops and validates methods for detecting those different “signatures,” while avoiding false positives, said Omar Holguin, the chemist who heads the laboratory.

A third aspect of PSL’s work for the FDA is development of a computerized risk-assessment system for identifying shipments of food entering the United States. The system is designed to “absorb a tremendous amount of data – unrelated, disparate data about that shipment, that industry, that supply chain, regulatory information,” Culbertson said. Using some of the principles of artificial intelligence, the system would order the information and assign a “risk score” to the food shipment, he said.

Karl Hill