Advances in Traceability Typing and Identification of Foodborne Pathogens

Foodborne pathogens are the main factors affecting food quality and safety. Timely and accurate strain typing data enable rapid detection of outbreak clusters, informing ongoing infection control and public health responses, which are important for preventing the outbreak of foodborne disease. In recent years, great progress has been made in various bacterial typing methods. This paper reviews typing techniques against foodborn bacterial pathogens, including serotyping, phage typing, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis, Repetitive-element PCR (Rep-PCR), infrequent restriction site PCR (IRS-PCR), amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), multilocus sequence typing (MLST), core-genome multilocus sequence typing (cgMLST), single nucleotide polymorphism, and matrix assisted laser desorption ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS). The principles of the different techniques are described with the condition in which they are applicable, and a comparative analysis of the traceability typing ability is discussed to provide epidemiological surveillance programmers for foodborne pathogens.