Nikki Shariat, assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, was recently quoted in a Poultry Health Today article about improving salmonella surveillance in turkeys.
Although traditionally, salmonella surveillance has been limited to detecting the most common serotypes present, researchers suspected that rather than existing as a single serotype in food animals, the pathogen exists as multiple serotypes.
“Work from my lab has shown this is, more often than not, the case in broilers,” Shariat said. “And we expect that the same is also going to be true for turkeys.”
Shariat and her colleagues plan to tackle the current limitation of only recognizing the most abundant serotype present.
“The way that this problem manifests itself is that we can find certain serotypes in the processing plant. Those are presumably ones that withstand processing interventions. But we’re not able to find those same serotypes in live production,” she said. “What we’re trying to determine in this project is whether there’s a serotype actually present in live production that is masked or hidden by serotypes that are more abundant or better able to grow during live production.”
The article continued to detail the importance of CRISPR technology for serotyping.
