From June 2019
What is advanced microbial profiling and how can it be used?
Traditional methods of troubleshooting problems caused by microorganisms require culturing of that microorganism. This has limitations linked to the conditions used to grow microbes.
AMP (advanced microbial profiling) is a powerful DNA technique used to determine the unique mix of the microorganisms (microbiome) in a sample without needing to culture them in a lab. AMP can benefit the whole of the food industry. By showing ‘everything that is there’ - not just those microbes that can be cultured - it can help address problems that would otherwise go unsolved.
Advantages of AMP
AMP is a technique that takes advantage of recent advances in DNA sequencing technology allowing huge numbers of different individual DNA sequences to be read at any one time. This means that the individual DNA sequences of a mixed bacterial population can be read directly from a single DNA extract of a food sample.
The advantages of this are that previously uncultured organisms can be identified and little manipulation is needed to produce data regarding the bacterial composition of the sample.
Advantages of AMP over traditional culturing techniques:
- identifies organisms that are difficult or impossible to culture in the lab
- identifies both healthy and injured organisms
- can analyse dozens of samples simultaneously
- can analyse thousands of microbial marker genes simultaneously in a single sample
Applications of AMP
We used AMP technology for a research project into enhancing shelf-life evaluation by investigating:
- which organism is really responsible for spoilage (even if it cannot be cultured)
- experimental biases that occur when using selective agar-based approaches
- microbiome changes during superchilling
- how to trace meat to where it was processed
- the impact of animal husbandry on microflora
Read about our shelf life evaulation research here
Future research
A new member-funded research project will build on this work. It will re-evaluate microbial specifications for a range of chilled products and analyse the effect that naturally occurring microflora have on the growth of pathogenic microflora. This will allow specifications to be set specifically for those organisms of concern, potentially extending shelf-life. Indication of the effects that spoilage flora have on pathogens will give producers more confidence in the ability of their products to remain safe, should contamination occur.
White papers
New insights for spoilage, shelf-life and contamination
of meat and fish products with advanced microbial
profiling (AMP)
Microbial metagenomics and the food industry
Microbial whole genome sequencing and the food
industry
Contact: Greg Jones
+44(0)1386 842143
greg.jones@campdenbri.co.uk