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Research Finding Some Answers to Salmonella Question
Published Thursday, July 03, 2008 at 04:51 AM
No one knows exactly how microbes like Listeria monocytogenes or Salmonella enterica can attach themselves to the bumpy leaves of a cabbage or the ultra-fine root hairs of a tender young alfalfa sprout. But, ARS food safety scientists in Albany, California want to know. Researchers at the ARS Western Regional Research Center hope their work will lead to new ways to protect cabbage, sprouts and other salad favorites from attack by foodborne pathogens.

Several years ago microbiologist Lisa Gorski led an investigation that was the first to document the genes that L. monocytogenes uses during a successful invasion of cabbage leaves. Now she wants to pinpoint genes responsible for the widely varying ability of eight different Listeria strains to successfully colonize the hair-thin strands, called root hairs, of alfalfa sprouts.

Though scientists elsewhere had looked at genes that this Listeria turns on--or "expresses"--when it's grown on a bed of gel-like agar in a laboratory, no one had, at the time of Gorski's investigation, ever documented genes that this microbe expresses when it grows on a vegetable. The team found that Listeria, when invading cabbage, calls into play some of the same genes that plant-dwelling microbes routinely use to colonize and spread harmlessly on plants.

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