Microbial community analysis of bacteria recovered from Romaine lettuce leaves and aggregative swabs of Romaine leaves.

The goal of this project was to compare the bacterial communities recovered from Romaine lettuce leaves and aggregative swabs of Romaine leaves to see if there is potential to use aggregative swabs for food safety testing. The potential advantage of collecting aggregative swabs over Romaine tissue samples is that the swabs can be collected nondestructively and can come in contact with more Romaine plants and therefore be potentially more representative of the Romaine field. A sample that is more representative of the field could in theory potentially have a better change at recovering microorganisms relevant to food safety. Analysis was done to compare the Romaine tissue and the aggregative swab samples' performance in recovering quality and food safety bacterial indicators.

本项目的宗旨在于对比从罗马生菜叶片及叶片聚集样本中恢复的细菌群落，以探究使用聚集样本进行食品安全检测的潜在可能性。相较于罗马生菜组织样本，收集聚集样本的优势在于其采集过程具有非破坏性，且能够与更多的罗马生菜植株接触，从而在理论上可能更全面地代表罗马生菜田的实际情况。一个更全面地反映现场情况的样本，从理论上讲，将有可能提高恢复与食品安全相关的微生物的几率。分析旨在比较罗马生菜组织样本与聚集样本在恢复品质及食品安全细菌指标方面的性能表现。