IN SITU SALMONELLA CONTAMINATION DETECTION IN WHOLE CHICKEN WITH LAB-IN-A-PACKAGE

Foodborne illness from the consumption of pathogen-contaminated food has significantly increased in recent years, resulting in over 600 million global cases annually [1].To help address this growing crisis, a multitude of food sensors have been recently reported.However, these technologies cannot perform in situ detection directly within food packaging as they require necessary reagents and require significant sample processing with external apparatus [2], [3].As such, we propose that an ideal in situ pathogen detection system should: (1) enable sensor visualization within sealed packaging, (2) concentrate sample solution from food onto the sensor surface, (3) store necessary reagents for sensor functionality without changing any organoleptic properties of the food item, and (4) facilitate analyte molecule diffusion onto the sensor surface.Herein, we describe our novel food packaging system coined Lab-in-a-Package, which detects Salmonella typhimurium in whole chicken samples without any external manipulation, all within sealed food packaging.Specifically, this solution consists of a re-engineered, inclined food packaging tray with a cutout window to address objectives ( 1) and ( 2) as well as an integrated membrane with optimized diffusion which can incorporate any necessary reagents for objectives (3) and ( 4).The complete Lab-ina-Package system is shown in Figure 1.A new synthetic functional nucleic acid probe (FNAP) specific to Salmonella was also introduced to integrate the other elements into an in situ detection platform (Figure 2).Nucleic acid sensors and contamination sensors in general have been previously developed and reported, however, this work represents the first amalgamation of contamination sensors directly into food packaging for in situ detection.