Grant: Alliance Grants

This project will explore and create solutions to a major public health problem, impacting thousands ofCanadians yearly and having substantial effects on Canada's agricultural and food processing industry. This problem is ensuring food safety in the context of contamination of food by major bacterial pathogens during the process of food production and processing. This is an important issue to consumers, the agricultural industry and government as thousands of lives and billions of dollars are at risk every day due to unsafe food production and consumption. Our objective is to develop and validate robust, reliable and easy to use point-of-production assays kits to detect Salmonella and Campylobacter, two important species of bacteria that commonly cause food-borne illness, in food samples as well as on food processing and preparation equipment and facilities. We will use the unique expertise of our team in microbiology, food and drug safety and assay development and validation to create novel, rapid and reliable assays by taking advantage of new gene editing technology known as CRISPR to rapidly detect these difficult to detect bacteria. The assays developed as a result of this research will be evaluated and validated by Health Canada and the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to rapidly move these Canadian-made assay kits from the laboratory into more than 500 food safety laboratories across the integrated North American food production and supply chain, enhancing the safety of food for all Canadians, improving Canada's ability to export food and also strengthening Canada's biotechnology industry and providing employment and opportunity to Canadianworkers.