Current and Emerging Technologies for Rapid Detection of Pathogens

Foodborne diseases, caused by pathogenic bacteria, have become an important social issue in the field of food safety. It presents a widespread and growing threat to human health in both developed and developing countries. As such, techniques for the detection of foodborne pathogens and waterborne pathogens are urgently needed to prevent the occurrence of human foodborne infections. Although traditional culture-based bacterial isolation and identification are the “gold standard” methods with high preciseness, their drawbacks in time-consuming are inadequate for rapid detection of pathogen to reduce foodborne disease occurrence. Fortunately, with the development of biotechnologies and nanotechnologies, various kinds of new technologies for rapid detection of pathogens have been developed so far, such as nucleic acid-based methods, antibody-based methods, and aptamer-based assays. In this chapter, we summarized the principles and the application of some recent rapid detection technologies for pathogenic bacteria. Moreover, the advantages and disadvantages of the established and emerging rapid detection methods are addressed here.