Monoclonal Antibody- Based Dot- Blot ELISA for the Detection of Salmonella in Foods

Salmonellosis is one of the most important public and animal health problems, causing morbidity and mortality of humans and animals throughout the world. It is also a communicable disease readily trans missible from animals to man either directly or through contaminated products of animal origin. J Because of a steady and significant increase in salmonellosis and a high econo mic loss,2 food industries, govern ments and Consumers have been in terested in decreasing the incidence of the infection. Therefore detec tion of Salmonella contamination in foods and feeds becomes critical to controlling this disease. The conventional method of detecting salmonellae in foods is by culture, which depends on selective media and biochemical reactions to separate Salmonella strains from other enteric bacteria.3 Although it is still the most reliable method, culture is expensive, laborious and time consuming. J 4 The whole process, which involves pre-enrich ment, selective enrichment, selec tive plating and biochemical tests requires at least 5 days, during which export food companies incur addi tional costs as a result of the pro longed storage of the food. Attempts have been made to develop simple, accurate, rapid and inexpensive methods to detect sal monellae in foods and feeds. Among them, the most favorable method SUMMARY Monoclonal antibody (MAb) produced to polysaccharides in the LPS molecule of salmonellae was used in a dot-blot EUSA for detecting Salmonella in 87