Neogen has announced that the US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has issued a letter of no objection for the use of Neogen's NeoSEEK pathogen DNA detection method to detect Shiga toxin-producing strains of E. coli (STECs).
The letter of no objection allows the use of the 24-hour NeoSEEK STEC system as a confirmatory method for six STEC serogroups (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, and O145). It states that NeoSEEK system is comparable to the reference method, FSIS MLG 5B.02, which can take three or more days to achieve a confirmatory result.
Neogen noted that this allows companies to use the NeoSEEK system to comply with the USDA's recently implemented regulation that requires the testing of raw beef trim for six new STEC serogroups, in addition to the previously regulated STEC, E. coli O157:H7.
Neogen chairman and CEO James Herbert said that the letter from the USDA provides further assurance to the customers that NeoSEEK system performs as designed.
"As worldwide food regulation has evolved to address newly identified threats to our global food supply, such as STECs, Neogen's test systems have evolved to rapidly and accurately detect those threats," Herbert added.
The NeoSEEK technology uses mass spectrometry-based multiplexing to determine the genetic composition of bacteria in a food sample, and then compares those results with the known genetic makeup of the target E. coli strains to detect and differentiate the target strains.
Neogen develops and markets products dedicated to food and animal safety.
