MICROBIOLOGICAL CONTROL OF CULTURE MEDIA USED IN THE EVIDENCE OF FOOD-BORNE PATHOGENS AND THEIR PERFORMANCE PARAMETERS ON QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE METHODS.

A culture medium contains basic elements (water, nutrients), to which are added various supplements capable of contributing to the growth of the bacteria of interest, and at the same time, inhibiting the association flora. This study aimed for testing and optimization of special supplemented culture media used for diagnosis of microbial origin foodborne pathogens. For this, performance criteria (productivity, selectivity, and specificity) of ten different culture media used for the identification and characterization of most common bacteria (i.e., Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus) involved in food poisoning, were investigated. For the evaluation of the performance parameters, artificial contamination was performed with Reference Materials (MR) represented by reference strains, on two levels of contamination (low and high) and blank samples. On the qualitative methods (detection of L. monocytogenes and Salmonella spp.), selectivity, specificity, accuracy, concordance and evaluation of the detection limit at 50% (LOD50) were tested; while, on the quantitative methods (enumeration of E. coli and S. aureus), repeatability, reproducibility, critical difference and measurement uncertainty were assessed. For the qualitative methods (detection of L. monocytogenes and Salmonella spp.), the evaluated parameters showed values between 82-100% and 0.429-0.564 cfu/25 g for LOD50, respectively. For the quantitative methods (enumeration of E. coli and S. aureus), the values obtained had a measurement uncertainty between 0.24-0.26 log10 cfu/g). The performance criteria (productivity, selectivity and specificity) of the culture media investigated were successfully achieved. These findings on the benefits of the addition of supplements for the culture media used to diagnose food poisoning provide further evidence of the importance of additional components with the role of enrichment, stimulation, inhibition, selection and highlighting of metabolic and enzymatic equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]