Meat&Poultry - March 2011 - 88
Food Safety Food-safety fortress KSU’s Biosecurity Research Institute focuses on foodsafety using cutting edge research and education BY BRYAN SALVAGE bsalvage@sosland.com T here’s a major food-safety force tak ing shape in Manhat tan, Kan.; a unique biocontainment research and training facility named the Biosecurity Research Institute (BRI). Located at Pat Roberts Hall on the Kansas State Univ. campus, this facility serves as a safe and secure location for researchers studying high-consequence pathogens (See BRI: A work in progress, Page 96). E. coli O157:H7 and its shigatoxinproducing cousins are currently a major focus of public health programs, research programs and beef industry efforts, and this will be a primary regulatory and research focus for the next several years, says Randall Phebus, Ph.D., Professor of Food Safety & Defense at KSU. He is also a scientific principal investigator (PI) at the BRI. BRI researchers have been active in understanding the risks this group of pathogens poses to the beef industry. “We have been developing detection methodologies targeting this broader group of STEC [Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli], and my colleague Dr. T.G. Nagaraja’s research group has successfully developed a multi-plex polymerase chain reaction [PCR] assay that de- tects the seven primary STEC simultaneously from environmental and bovine fecal samples.” Research is further validating this assay for beef products and surveillance studies have been conducted to gauge the prevalence of these different STEC in production environments. “I am working with Dr. Harshavardhan Thippareddi at the Univ. of Nebraska to model the growth and Above (from left): Dr. Richard Oberst (Co-PI), Casey Paddock and Rachael Sullivan (research assistants) work in the BSL-3 containment laboratory. (Photo courtesy of the BRI) 88 • Meat&Poultry • March 2011 • www.MeatPoultry.com
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