Research aims to streamline the detection of foodborne viruses

So, Moore, an associate professor of food science, is on a continuing quest to devise more efficient and effective ways to identify these food-borne viruses in time to prevent or quickly respond to an outbreak of gastroenteritis, or worse. 

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“One of the biggest challenges in effectively and routinely detecting viruses in foods and the environment is the lack of an efficient method to concentrate a small number of viruses from a large, complex food/environmental sample,” Moore explains. “Often, viral contamination of foods and the environment occurs at low levels even though consumption of the foods can still get people sick – because only a small number of viruses are needed to cause illness.”

The low levels of viruses are what creates the needle-in-the-haystack problem. “One of the major roadblocks to being able to easily detect viruses in foods is the lack of a portable, fast means of picking out these viruses out of large food samples into a smaller volume so we can readily detect them,” Moore adds.

To attack this problem, Moore has received a $650,000 grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Agricultural and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) to develop and investigate magnetic liquids for concentrating and detecting foodborne noroviruses and hepatitis A. 

Moore and collaborators at Iowa State University, Jared Anderson and Byron Brehm-Stecher, will look at two types of magnetic liquids – magnetic ionic liquids (MILs) and deep eutectic solvents (DESs) – for concentrating noroviruses (the leading cause of foodborne illnesses in the U.S.) and hepatitis A virus from food and environmental samples. “Both MILs and DESs have shown promise for concentration and detection of other pathogen and contamination targets, like bacteria, but work on viruses is still limited,” Moore says. 

Promising reagents

This project builds on research in Moore’s lab by doctoral student Sloane Stoufer, who received a NIFA fellowship doing foundational work with MILs. Stoufer’s research suggests that MILs may be promising reagents for concentration and detection of closely related surrogate viruses to human noroviruses, as well as for extracting their viral genomes for amplification-based detection. Further, the project builds on additional promising data produced by then-undergraduate UMass Amherst researcher Lily Saad, now a graduate student, whose work showed similar promise for DESs. 

Traditional methods require several, labor-intensive and time-consuming steps for separation of the virus from the contaminated sample and concentration into a smaller volume to increase the likelihood of obtaining a detectable level of virus. 

Streamlining the process

Moore and team’s research aims to combine the steps, streamlining the viral detection process, better preventing foodborne illness and improving the public health response.

“Given their potential for concentrating a wide range of foodborne pathogens and contaminants from foods, as well as their ability for also capturing nucleic acids, magnetic liquids have the potential to be a valuable one-stop reagent for upstream processing of samples in a portable, rapid, single-tube manner that could help maintain the safety of the food supply,” Moore says.