Selective pre-enrichment method to lessen time needed to recover Salmonella from commercial poultry processing samples

Conventional Salmonella detection is time consuming, often employing a 24-h pre-enrichment step in buffered peptone water (BPW), followed by a 24-h selective enrichment in either Rappaport Vassiliadis (RV) or tetrathionate (TT) broths before streaking onto selective indicator agar. To reduce this time, we sought to optimize pre-enrichment for Salmonella recovery by evaluating the addition of selective chemicals to BPW. Duplicate samples each representative of 500 carcasses were collected by catching processing water drip under moving carcass shackle lines immediately after feather removal in each of nine commercial processing plants. Carcass drip samples were cultured under selective pre-enrichment conditions in parallel with BPW pre-enrichment followed by RV and TT selective enrichment. Addition of bile salts (1 g/L) and novobiocin (0.015 g/L) resulted in Salmonella recovery from 89% samples when plated directly after pre-enrichment compared to 67% recovery in non-selective BPW alone. Salmonella serovar identities were determined using CRISPR-SeroSeq. Overall, serovars matched between selective pre-enrichment and traditional enrichment methods. These data suggest that increasing the selectivity of Salmonella pre-enrichment step may lessen the need for a separate selective enrichment step thereby reducing time required for Salmonella isolation by 24 h.