PCR for the Specific Detection of an Escherichia coli O157:H7 Laboratory Control Strain

Control strains of bacterial pathogens such as Escherichia coli O157:H7 are commonly processed in parallel with test samples in food microbiology laboratories as a quality control measure to assure the satisfactory performance of materials used in the analytical procedure. Before positive findings can be reported for risk management purposes, analysts must have a means of verifying that pathogenic bacteria (e.g., E. coli O157:H7) recovered from test samples are not due to inadvertent contamination with the control strain routinely handled in the laboratory environment. Here, we report on the application of an in-house bioinformatic pipeline for the identification of unique genomic signature sequences in the development of specific oligonucleotide primers enabling the identification of a common positive control strain, E. coli O157:H7 (ATCC 35150), using a simple PCR procedure.