Valentino, Vincenzo (2023) Environmental Microbiome Mapping in the Food Industry: a Strategy to Improve Food Quality and Safety. [Tesi di dottorato]

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To ensure quality and safety of food products, food business operators adopt routinary cleaning and disinfection procedures in their food processing environments. However, even after these procedures, some microorganisms might become resident and specific to the facility. One strategy that bacteria use to establish on surfaces is through the production of biofilms, which further protect them from disinfectants and detergents and enhance the transmission of antimicrobial resistance genes. To date, methodologies used by food business operators to verify the efficiency of such procedures require the isolation of microorganisms and on the phenotypic characterization of isolates, which are quite slow and might not detect Viable But Not Culturable (VBNC) microorganisms. Therefore, this thesis aims to validate a procedure relying on the High Troughput Sequencing-based mapping of microbial communities residing in the food industry in order to assess the composition of the communities (at species- and strain-level) and their potential outcomes for food quality and safety. Such procedure might represent a new tool for food business operators, which might better assess the efficacy of their cleaning and disinfection procedures. Overall, the technique lead us to identify potentially spoilage taxa in the different industrial settings, and to describe their virulence and antimicrobial-resistance potential. Also, in cheesemaking facilities, we detected some facility-specific strains which might represent a fingerprint of the products, making their sensory profiles unique.

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