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www.sciencemag.org/products1582

very diffi cult to resolve by PFGE,” Musser says. Using this tech-

nique, “it looks like this one group of Salmonella are often caus-

ing the same problems.”

That’s a concern, Musser explains, because, when it comes to

food forensics, it’s important to defi ne an outbreak’s boundaries.

The deli meat incident came not long after another Salmonella

contamination event involving pistachios. The question was,

were these two cases related?

To fi nd out, Musser and his team subjected some 40 or so

patient samples and food samples to whole-genome sequenc-

ing with Roche/454 Life Sciences’ technology, using phylogenet-

ics to sort the specimens into evolutionarily related clusters. The

results confi rmed the outbreak’s association with contaminated

spices (and not pistachios), while at the same time “decoupling”

one apparently linked case from California. The data even hinted

at the outbreak’s geographical origin, as implicated strains clus-

tered more tightly with East coast-derived samples than with

West coast or international ones.

“The data are off-the-charts amazing,” Musser says. And they

highlight how high-end technology is empowering the food safe-

ty industry. But that doesn’t mean FDA is going to start using

next generation sequencing in every outbreak; it’s still too ex-

pensive. “It’s like a really big cannon; you only use it when you

need it.”

THE TECHNOLOGIES OF FOOD FORENSICSAt SGS Consumer Testing Services, a company that tests food

on behalf of food producers, microbial testing has given way to

chemical analysis, says Robert Parrish, vice president for global

food. With an ever-growing roster of substances, including some

500 pesticides, prohibited globally, says Parrish, “What we have

seen over the years is a much wider need for much lower level

detection of things like pesticides, heavy metals, antibiotic resi-

dues, and other things that should not be in a product.”

The list of technologies SGS scientists apply to assay

such compounds include GC-MS and LC-MS/MS, ICP-OES

(inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy) for

It’s a tough time for food manufacturers. Every week, it seems,

government regulators announce that some food or other is

being recalled for bacterial contamination, toxins, or carcinogens.

Among the recent headlines, dozens have been sickened and

two have died in an outbreak linked to contaminated pastries in

Rhode Island. In January, a dioxin scare halted sales of poultry,

eggs, and pork from Germany. And let’s not forget radiation in

Japan, oil in the Gulf, and melamine in pet food and powdered

milk. If the average American never thought about food safety

before, the past few years have made it abundantly clear they

need to start. Fortunately, food producers and inspectors are

way ahead of them. By Jeffrey M. Perkel

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According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention (CDC), roughly 48 million Americans are sick-

ened each year from foodborne diseases, resulting in

128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths.

Numbering among those millions were 272 individuals in 44

states and the District of Columbia who were sickened between

July 2009 and April 2010. An investigation by the CDC identifi ed

“ready-to-eat Italian-style meats” as the likely culprit. Samples

of deli meats from Rhode Island-based Daniele International

were harboring Salmonella, the result of contaminated black

and red pepper that the company used as a spice rub. The com-

pany ultimately recalled some 1.4 million pounds of food.

As the outbreak unfolded, the U.S. Department of Agricul-

ture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, CDC, and Food and

Drug Administration (FDA) collaborated to identify its source.

Their tool of choice: Pulsed-fi eld gel electrophoresis (PFGE) fi n-

gerprinting, the method at the heart of CDC’s PulseNet track-

ing database.

PFGE fi ngerprinting uses the restriction pattern created by di-

gesting bacterial DNA with rare-cutting enzymes as a molecular

identifi er of an outbreak’s causative agent. According to Steve

Musser, director of the Offi ce of Regulatory Science at the FDA’s

Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, the technique has

all the advantages one would expect of a good forensics tool:

It’s easy, inexpensive, and widely adopted by public health labo-

ratories. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work so well, as differ-

ent (but related) bacterial strains can produce identical patterns.

“Particularly with Salmonella, we run into serotypes that are

DOES THIS TASTE FUNNY? THE TECHNOLOGIES OF FOOD

FORENSICS

When it comes to

food forensics,

it’s important to defi ne an

outbreak’s boundaries.

LIFE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES

FOOD SAFETY

AAAS/Science Business Office Feature

UPCOMING FEATURES

Proteomics: Protein Folding—August 26

qPCR—October 7

Genomics: Gene Expression Analysis—November 4

www.sciencemag.org/products 1583

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continued »

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“It [high-resolution GC-MS] provides higher

separating power so you can differentiate, for

instance, a mass of 321.1234 from 321.1200.”

a higher price for their food, as it would appear to contain more

protein than it really did.

Yet as far as researchers could tell, melamine was relatively

harmless, Martos says; in fact, animal studies in cats and dogs

suggested they could tolerate high doses with no ill effects. But

drawing on research by George Whitesides in the early 1990s,

Martos realized that melamine and a related compound, cyanu-

ric acid, could form aggregates in vivo. In the acidic stomach,

the two compounds are soluble; under basic conditions such as

the kidneys, they crash out of solution. “If you can imagine an

instantaneous kidney stone—that’s essentially the way I would

perceive it,” Martos said in 2007.

Martos suspects vendors could have been adding melamine

for years without consequence, until cyanuric acid entered the

mix as well. The question was, how to detect both compounds

in a rapid, robust, and reliable way? After all, at the time nobody

knew which pet food was dangerous, and which was safe.

In March 2007, he and his team developed a rapid method to

resolve that question. Pet food samples were extracted, dilut-

ed—sometimes up to 10,000 times, he says—and separated on

a zwitterionic-ion hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography

column coupled to a triple quadrupole MS. Total analysis time:

three minutes.

“We quickly established which tissue samples were positive,”

he says. “And we tested the pet food that was fed to the animals

that died, and there it was—the smoking gun.”

Of course, pet food was only the beginning. In 2008, the scan-

dal expanded to include human products. According to Reuters,

“at least six children died and nearly 300,000 became ill from

powdered milk laced with melamine.”

DEEPWATER HORIZONIn the wake of the melamine crisis, and in recognition of wider

emerging risks to the global food chain, Thermo Fisher

Scientifi c marshaled its intellectual, fi nancial, and analytical

resources to build what it calls the Food Safety Response

Center (FSRC).

heavy metals, and in response to the radiation leak at Japan’s

Fukushima nuclear power plant, handheld and benchtop gamma

spectrometers. “This [radiation testing] has been a big one in

the past couple of weeks,” Parrish says. And of course, the

technologies evolve too; the company is now testing “next

generation” GC/GC-TOF mass spectrometry. “The technology is

not quite there to be commercialized yet,” he says.

Last December, when the German poultry and pork industries

were rocked by a dioxin scare, researchers at the German

Chemical and Veterinary Analytical Institute, Muensterland-

Emscher-Lippe, applied high-resolution GC-MS, says Peter

Fuerst, honorary professor of food chemistry. “It provides higher

separating power so you can differentiate, for instance, a mass

of 321.1234 from 321.1200.” Now, says Fuerst, his lab is working

to determine whether GC-MS/MS, which uses mass transitions

(as opposed to the mass of the parental ion) to detect ions of

interest, can also satisfy European Union regulations.

Daniel Marshak, chief scientifi c offi cer at PerkinElmer, a com-

pany that produces analytical instrumentation for the food safety

market, says his company has worked with Chinese collabora-

tors to ensure that feed stock manufacturers don’t illegally spike

animal feed (which should be made with fi sh or plant proteins)

with protein derived from ruminants such as sheep.

“Unscrupulous folks sometimes try to sneak that in small pro-

portions into cattle feed to fl esh it out, hoping we won’t be able

to see it by this infrared (IR) method,” Marshak explains. But,

using the company’s IR and IR-Raman microscopes, “we can ac-

tually see which particles are from ruminant materials and which

are from plant or fi sh material, because we get full spectral in-

formation from each of the pixels in our image.” As a result, po-

tential pathogens are excluded at the feed stock level, since “it’s

very diffi cult to do that analysis when ordering a fi llet mignon,”

he says.

Even macroscale imaging plays a role. Japan’s Ajinomoto,

which, among other things, sells some $100 million in frozen

dumplings annually, X-rays every package for metal, rocks, and

other solid contaminants, says Chief Executive Offi cer Takeshi

Kimura. It even stores those images to better customer service.

“If a customer complains about the package, we can call that

image up,” Kimura explains.

FOOL’S PROTEINOftentimes, though, users never know food is contaminated un-

til it’s too late.

Until recently, for instance, nobody tested food for melamine

because they had no reason to suspect they’d fi nd it. But that

changed in 2007, when thousands of pet owners in the Unit-

ed States and Canada began reporting that their cats and dogs

were suddenly and mysteriously falling ill and dying of acute

kidney stones.

Attention quickly focused on melamine, a chemical used as a

fi re-retardant and in the manufacturing of plastics, which was

found in high doses in certain imported Chinese pet foods. Ap-

parently, some vendors were spiking raw ingredients with nitro-

gen-rich melamine to spoof the Kjeldahl protein detection assay,

which uses nitrogen as a surrogate for protein content, says

Perry Martos, method development manager in the Agriculture

and Food Laboratory at the University of Guelph in Ontario,

Canada. By adding cheap melamine, these vendors could fetch

LIFE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES

FOOD SAFETY

AAAS/Science Business Office Feature

www.sciencemag.org/products1584

DOI: 10.1126/science.opms.p1100056

searching for a sulfurous whiff of eau-d’-petroleum. Samples

that passed that test were then subjected to a time-consuming

GC-MS assay. Tissue samples were homogenized into a “milk-

shake,” and treated with base to crack open the cells. PAH re-

sides in lipids, so the next step was to extract the cellular soup

three or four times with organic solvents, concentrate the result-

ing material, and inject it onto the GC-MS.

“It’s a long, laborious, pain-in-the-butt process,” Overton con-

cedes.

Faster methods have since been devised. FDA developed one

two-day procedure based on LC-fl uorescence spectroscopy, for

instance, while chemists at Thermo’s FSRC used GC-MS/MS to

get answers in just three and a half hours. According to Broski,

the trick isn’t developing a working protocol per se, but rather

one that is straightforward, reliable, and reproducible. “A meth-

od has to be robust enough that it can be replicated in multiple

labs,” he explains. “Sample preparation accounts for a substan-

tial portion of the workfl ow, and we have designed our methods

to eliminate as much variability as possible.”

NO MORE BAD EGGS?Motivated in part by the spate of food recalls and outbreaks of

the past few years, the U.S. Congress in 2010 passed the FDA

Food Safety Modernization Act, which one report called “the

largest overhaul of U.S. food safety laws since 1938.” The Act,

according to the FDA, “aims to ensure the U.S. food supply is

safe by shifting the focus of federal regulators from respond-

ing to contamination to preventing it.” This “will help bring the

United States into the 21st century,” says Parrish.

Yet despite the best intentions of government and industry,

with so many players, and with an intricately interconnected

global food chain, the food we eat can never be completely safe.

In any given meal, Marshak says, an individual might consume

shrimp from Southeast Asia, wine from South Africa, grain from

the United States, and fruits and vegetables from Europe, Latin

America, and Australia. “The food that passes your lips, both

in processed or raw or cooked form, comes from all over the

world,” Marshak says.

Those countries have different customs, standards, and regula-

tions, not all of which necessarily rise to the levels expected by

U.S. consumers. Producers looking to game the system (clenb-

uterol-laced pork, anyone?) don’t help. But even were that not

the case, for today’s food inspectors the goal line keeps moving.

For instance, says Paul Zavitsanos, worldwide food industry

marketing director at Agilent Technologies, variations in tem-

perature profi les in the Gulf Stream are causing increased algal

blooms over mussel beds. Some produce paralytic shellfi sh tox-

ins, Zavitsanos says, so there’s a need for methods to detect

them. Next week, though, the threat could be different. “It’s a

constant game of catch-up,” he says.

“For many, it’s quite scary,” concedes Parrish, “but what will

you do? Become a vegetarian, you could be eating too many

pesticides. If you eat too much fi sh, it could be mercury or antibi-

otics. So eat everything in moderation and enjoy yourself.”

Located in Dreieich, Germany, just outside Frankfurt, and

representing a “very signifi cant” investment, the FSRC boasts

LC-triple quads, high-resolution mass spectrometry, a GC-triple

quad, and an LC-single quad, says Gerry Broski, food safety mar-

keting director at Thermo Fisher Scientifi c. “Just about every in-

strument you can use for analysis is in that lab.” That equipment,

as well as the center’s three staff chemists, have one mission,

Broski says: “To quickly respond in the event of a chemical con-

tamination event and to develop a method of analysis.”

Opened in April 2010, the FSRC has been activated once, Bros-

ki says, during the Gulf oil spill in July 2010. The team wanted to

help develop a rapid method to detect polycyclic aromatic hydro-

carbons (PAH) in Gulf seafood.

It’s not as if detection methods didn’t already exist. Accord-

ing to Edward Overton, professor emeritus of environmental sci-

ences at Louisiana State University, who as part of a National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hazardous

materials response team has worked on oil spills since the early

1980s (including the Exxon Valdez), the situation was complicat-

ed by the specifi c question people were asking.

Rather than asking whether the seafood was contaminated

with oil in general, people wanted to know whether it was safe

to eat, period. That latter question requires measuring PAHs in

the low part-per-billion range, a much more rigorous test—and

one, Overton notes, that is not applied to seafood caught else-

where in the United States or that is imported.

“It’s a lot easier to say [seafood] is contaminated with oil,”

Overton says, “you can look for hydrocarbons that are typical

of petroleum. But when you have to analyze lipid-rich samples

for low part-per-billion levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,

that is extremely time consuming.”

The method that was applied in the summer of 2010 was a

two-tiered, multiday procedure, Overton says. The fi rst step was

a so-called “organoleptic” analysis: Experts “sniffed” the food,

Jeffrey M. Perkel is a freelance science writer based in Pocatello, Idaho.

FEATURED PARTICIPANTS

Agilent Technologieswww.agilent.com

Ajinomoto www.ajinomoto.com

Chemical and Veterinary Analytical Institute, Muensterland-Emscher-Lippescim.ag/kUVPyo

Louisiana State Universitywww.lsu.edu

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationwww.noaa.gov

PerkinElmerwww.perkinelmer.com

SGS Consumer Testing Serviceswww.us.sgs.com

Thermo Fisher Scientifi cwww.thermofi sher.com

University of Guelphwww.uoguelph.ca

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventionwww.cdc.gov

U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Serviceswww.fsis.usda.gov

U.S. Food and Drug Administrationwww.fda.gov

LIFE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES

FOOD SAFETY

AAAS/Science Business Office Feature

www.sciencemag.org/products 1585

Newly offered instrumentation, apparatus, and laboratory materials of interest to researchers in all disciplines in academic, industrial, and governmental organizations are

featured in this space. Emphasis is given to purpose, chief characteristics, and availability of products and materials. Endorsement by Science or AAAS of any products or

materials mentioned is not implied. Additional information may be obtained from the manufacturer or supplier.

QUADRUPOLE-ORBITRAP MASS SPECTROMETER

The Q Exactive high-performance benchtop quadrupole-Orbitrap LC-

MS/MS is the fi rst commercially available instrument to bring togeth-

er quadrupole precursor selection and high-resolution accurate mass

(HR/AM) Orbitrap mass analysis to deliver high-confi dence quantita-

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Thermo Fisher Scientifi c

For info: 800-532-4752 www.thermoscientifi c.com/qexactive

CONTAMINANT QUANTITATION

The DART XZ Transmission Module is designed for rapid identifi ca-

tion and quantitation of components present in food products, di-

etary supplements, and chemicals. Available as a new Experiment

Module for use with the DART-SVP open-air ionization source, the

XZ Transmission Module enables analysis in seconds per sample.

When combined with the latest generation of mass spectrometers

from Thermo, Agilent, Waters, Bruker, and AB SCIEX, the system

quickly identifi es contaminants or economic adulterants, providing a

critical tool for nontargeted screening. In operation, liquid samples or

extracts are pipetted onto 96 discrete positions of the XZ Transmis-

sion Module consumable screen by using either manual pipetting

or laboratory robotics, thus allowing integration of the device into

the laboratory workfl ow and informatics. Automated analyses of the

samples is completed by moving the screen into position between

the front of the DART source and the inlet of the mass spectrometer

under control of the SVP software.

IonSense

For info: 781-484-1043 www.ionsense.com

ICP-OE SPECTROMETERS

The Optima 8x00 series of inductively coupled plasma optical emis-

sion spectrometers (ICP-OES) offers improved performance and

reduced operating costs for analysis of environmental, food, phar-

maceutical, product safety, and geochemical samples. ICP-OES is

a highly sensitive, rapid technique for determining the elemental

composition of a wide variety of sample types. The Optima 8x00

series is designed for ease of use and exceptional throughput and

detection limits, which helps maximize productivity and profi tabil-

ity of testing laboratories. The Optima 8x00 series has a number

of new features that will enable laboratories to lower their cost

per analysis and more easily meet the ever-changing regulatory

requirements. New innovative radio frequency generator tech-

nology dramatically reduces argon consumption, thus driving a

reduction in the cost of ownership with increased effi ciency. A

novel electronic sample introduction system provides superior

sensitivity, which, coupled with enhanced stability, helps address

the ever-increasing regulatory demands of the environmental and

pharmaceutical markets.

PerkinElmer

For info: 800-762-4000 www.perkinelmer.com

PCR ASSAYS

Eleven new mericon kits are offered for convenient, fast, and reliable

food testing. The complete mericon portfolio encompasses products

for the detection of a broad range of genetically modifi ed organisms

(GMOs), pathogens, and ingredients from animals or plants. The

new, ready-to-use real-time polymerase chain reaction assays include

GMO kits for the quantifi cation of MON810 and RoundUp Ready

Soy, as well as the detection of the 35S-pat and CTP2-CP4EPSPS

constructs. Additionally, other new kits are designed for the iden-

tifi cation of ingredients from cattle, chicken, turkey, corn, and apri-

cot kernels. Qiagen’s food testing offering now comprises 27 PCR

assays and covers the complete workfl ow from dedicated sample

preparation solutions for a variety of sample types through to analysis

and detection.

Qiagen

For info: 800-426-8157 www.qiagen.com

LIFE SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES

NEW PRODUCTS: FOOD SAFETY

AAAS/Science Business Office Feature

AUTOMATED TITRATORS

The TitroLine titrator series can be used for advanced titration and dosing applications. This series

completes SI Analytics’ offering of automatic titrators and includes the TitroLine 6000, TitroLine

7000, and TITRONIC 500 piston burette. The family of instruments combines accuracy and ease-of-

use to create solutions that offer unmatched fl exibility and reliability for content analysis in various

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Electronically submit your new product description or product literature information! Go to www.sciencemag.org/products/newproducts.dtl for more information.

Submission

deadline

August 1

imagination at work

* For the purpose of this prize, molecular biology isdefined as “that part of biology which attempts tointerpret biological events in terms of the physico-chemical properties of molecules in a cell”.

(McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific andTechnical Terms, 4th Edition).

GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences AB,Björkgatan 30, 751 84 Uppsala, Sweden.© 2011 General Electric Company– All rights reserved.

28-9402-06AB

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The GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.Because brilliant ideas build better realities.

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