Mingdao

In this year’s competition, our team has decided to focus on food safety issues. In modern days, more and more dietary manufacturers started to use inferior or sometimes even harmful materials to produce our daily-life food to lower their budget. The same thing happens to egg manufacturers, leading to a common issue with eggs, the presence of salmonella. Salmonella often appears on raw eggs, causing consumers to experience severe stomach flu (gastroenteritis) and typhoid fever after ingestion. The current approach to detect Salmonella is time-consuming, usually taking 2-7 days. Therefore, we have focused our experiment to genetically modify a phage carrying reporter gene such as GFP or luc, which can specifically infect Salmonella on food samples. After the infection, the reporter gene will enter the Salmonella, causing the bacteria to behave exactly how the reporter gene shapes it. Basically, if there is a change in the bacteria's behavior, it's an indication that Salmonellae are present on the food.