Food, Water & Environmental Diagnostics
In the food monitoring market, pathogenic organisms such as Listeria and Salmonella are among the commonest targets for detection. One of the biggest challenges here is to correctly categorise the many different strains of the organism which exist – which makes antibody specificity a particularly critical concern.
Due to the often low incidence of these organisms, the actual immunoassay sometimes follows a period of culture under selective conditions, to increase the proportion of the target species in the sample. This amplification step adds complexity to the quantification of the organism.
Water and environmental testing may target similar organisms in certain applications, but a wider range of analytes such as pollutants are often of interest.
Fleet Bioprocessing Ltd. have developed many immunoassays for use in food, water and environmental testing.
Contact us via our enquiry form here if you would like to discuss any of these assay applications.
Example Projects
Fleet consultant helps develop groundbreaking food pathogen assays
Assays for bacterial food contaminants such as Listeria and Salmonella are demanding due to the wide variety of strains which need to be detected, and the variability of the sample format. One of our customers engaged a Fleet expert with 40 years of assay development experience to help them arrive at a new ELISA format with groundbreaking time-to-result characteristics.
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Water contamination assays
Detection of specific microorganisms in environmental water samples is challenging, as concentrations can be very low and there may be large numbers of competing organisms with structural similarities to the target species. Fleet evaluated a number of novel assay formats combining commercial bacterial detection kits with specific antibody-coated magnetic particles. Although funding was not obtained to optimise the lead format into a commercial product, under laboratory conditions it showed reliable detection down to 10 CFU/ml.
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