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Faster Food Safety Results From Farm to Final Product

A recent patent given to Hygiena’s SalQuant system underscores the company’s evolving Salmonella quantification tool for processors.

Salmonella quantification detection SalQuant
The BAX System Real-Time PCR Assay for Salmonella enumerates low levels of Salmonella with shortened enrichment times, producing results within hours instead of days.
Hygiena

Food processors know that detecting and quantifying Salmonella is an ongoing battle, so tools used to identify the volume of that pathogen need to evolve for speed and accuracy to better protect the public. Simply enumerating Salmonella without contextual data is not enough today, especially for industries like meat processing.

Hygiena’s SalQuant system—which received a U.S. patent earlier this year—is one tool available to processors to quantify Salmonella faster than traditional methods like Most Probable Number (MPN), reducing test results from days to hours.

ProFood World spoke with Dr. Patrice Chablain, chief scientific officer at Hygiena, to learn more about the technology behind SalQuant, and how it can quantify Salmonella throughout the stages of processing. 

PFW: Please explain how the SalQuant system works, and how it was developed before coming to market.

Chablain: The patented BAX System SalQuant from Hygiena is a One Health Diagnostics application food processors can use to quantify Salmonella from the farm to final product. The BAX System Real-Time PCR Assay for Salmonella enumerates low levels of Salmonella with shortened enrichment times. It’s a molecular method that involves following a PCR protocol specific to the matrix of interest, and then running samples on the BAX System Q7 to yield cycle threshold (CT) results. The CT result for each sample is entered into a matrix-specific calculator to generate the corresponding quantified result as Log CFU per sample (or per g or mL). Prior to commercializing the SalQuant application, the development process involved testing multiple sample types at different inoculation levels to develop the most accurate linear fit curve to then be able to correlate CT values with quantitative results.

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PFW: Why is the recent patent granted by the U.S. an important milestone for SalQuant?

Chablain: While developing SalQuant, we enlisted help from external partners to analyze thousands of data points or samples and this patent is the result of months of development work. The patent not only strengthens our intellectual property position in quantification but also demonstrates our strategic commitment to developing innovative diagnostics that improve the health of people and animals in our shared environment.

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