Specific detection of viable Salmonella Enteritidis by phage amplification combined with qPCR (PAA-qPCR) in spiked chicken meat samples

Serovar Enteritidis represents 45.7% of all Salmonella reported human cases identified in Europe. Additionally, “minced meat and meat preparations from poultry” have a high level of non-compliance, regarding Salmonella regulation. In the current study, a novel method based on the amplification of the Salmonella bacteriophage vB_SenS_PVP-SE2, coupled with real-time PCR (qPCR), was developed and evaluated, for the rapid detection of viable Salmonella Enteritidis in chicken samples. The results obtained indicated that the qPCR method could detect down to 0.22 fg/μL of pure virus DNA and a concentration of viral particles of 103 pfu/mL. After a short bacterial recovery step, the addition of bacteriophages to spiked chicken samples indicated that 8 cfu/25 g could be detected within 10 h, including the time for DNA extraction and qPCR analysis. Additionally, the evaluation of the performance parameters: relative sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive and negative predictive values, and index kappa of concordance, obtained values higher than 92%, and the acceptability limit values were within the limits. All these results demonstrate that the proposed methodology is a powerful tool for the rapid detection of viable Salmonella Enteritidis.