Improved Multiplex Polymerase Chain Reaction for Rapid Staphylococcus Aureus Detection in Meat and Milk Matrices

Abstract

Staphylococcal food poisoning represents one of the most frequently occurring intoxications, caused by staphylococcal enterotoxins (SE-s) and staphylococcal enterotoxin-like proteins (SEl-s). Therefore, there is a need for rapid, sensitive and specific detection method for this human pathogen and its toxin genes in food matrices. The present work is focused on Staphylococcus aureus detection by a nonaplex polymerase chain reaction, which targets the 23S rRNA gene for identification of S. aureus at the species level, genes for classical SE-s (SEA, SEC, SED), new SE-s (SEH, SEI), SEl-s (SEK, SEL) and tsst-1 gene (toxic shock syndrome toxin). Primers were properly designed to avoid undesirable interactions and to create a reliably identifiable profile of amplicons when visualized in agarose gel. According to obtained results, this approach is able to reach the detection sensitivity of 12 colony forming units from milk and meat matrices without prior culturing and DNA extraction.