Harnessing Hitchhikers
Each year, foodborne disease destroys 33 million years of healthy life – hundreds of millions of people fall ill from eating contaminated food and hundreds of thousands never recover. How can we track food from farm to table, removing only the unsafe foods that have been contaminated?
The Springer lab has developed a way of converting the harmless microorganisms that live on food into sentinels for food safety. Food can be labeled at the site of product, using organisms with unique DNA barcodes. If a food turns out to contain a harmful contaminant, all food originating from that source can be flagged and eliminated.
Qian, J., Lu, Z.-X., Mancuso, C. P., Jhuang, H.-Y., del Carmen Barajas-Ornelas, R., Boswell, S. A., et al. (2020). Barcoded microbial system for high-resolution object provenance. Science, 368(6495), 1135–1140. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba5584