Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** current methods for detection of…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** current methods for detection of microbial contaminants on food industry surfaces use simple swabbing/wiping to extract microbes for analysis. This removes easily transferable microbes but fails to capturemicrobes living in biofilms, which reduces the detection sensitivity of current food safety testsand may mask the true degree of surface contamination. This increases the risk of food-borne outbreaks threatening human health and can result in costly recalls for food providers and losses in food customer confidence. The proposed project will develop, bioxpose, an innovative future product that will act as a detection assay enhancer and will containan optimized set of antibiofilm enzymes that can break down the physical structure of biofilms. By dissolving the housing protecting microbes hiding in biofilms they no longer can resist collection and detection. This gentle enzyme-centered approach does not kill biofilmmicrobes (as enzyme-containingcleaning products would)so the collected microbes can be used in detectionassays that require live organisms. The use of bioxposewill increase the collectionof viable microbes from biofilm coveredfood processing surfaces allowingincreaseddetection of surface contamination withall current types of food safety detection assays. This universal application will allow food safety managers to continue using their preferred detection systems but with betterperformance, and only a minor increasein cost. The phase i results provided several candidate enzyme cocktails (ECS) with high activity against a multi-species biofilm model. The phase II project will further develop the top PHI ECS to reach a market-ready product, bioxpose, and will consist of three objectives. In technical objective 1, refinements to the biofilm assay and bacterial release assay will be instituted and top ECS will be more comprehensively tested. For technical objective 2, lead ECS will be converted into product ready formulations that achieves the microbe release performance desired in the final product. In technical objective 3, the top EC will be tested against a more advanced multi-species biofilm using 2 downstream detection assays to compare bioxpose-treated VS controls by an independent contract lab.with the successful development of bioxpose, food industry surface contamination monitoring will achieve improved sensitivity, accuracy, and reliability through the use of bioxpose, a detection assay enhancer, which will provide better protection from food-borne illnesses, outbreaks, and will reduce product recalls, and drops in consumer confidence.