Bacteria Found That Kills Salmonella

Bacteria Found That Kills Salmonella

The FDA has a project called team tomato which discovered a bacteria that is not harmful to humans but kills salmonella and other bacteria that is harmful to humans This bacteria is called paenibacillus.  It produce antimicrobial substances that affect a wide spectrum of microorganisms such as Salmonella, fungi, soil bacteria, plant pathogenic bacteria and even important anaerobic pathogens as Clostridium botulinum. FDA will be working with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to facilitate the development of an organic treatment containing Paenibacillus that would kill Salmonella and other harmful organisms.

Some forms of Paenibacillus can bind nitrogen to the soil which could be very beneficial to agriculture.

Paenibacillus may be important in the future for medical uses. The FDA has recently made the requirements easier and cheaper for antibiotics drug trials. Pharmaceutical companies had stopped making antibiotics because of the costs involved.

The FDA started Team Tomato because no one knows why the tomato  is so vulnerable to contamination by Salmonella, a bacterium that is a common cause of foodborne illness.

From 1973 to 2010, there were 15 multistate outbreaks of illnesses attributed to Salmonella contamination of raw tomatoes, with 12 of these outbreaks taking place since 2000. They resulted in almost 2,000 confirmed illnesses and three deaths, with states in the eastern U.S. hardest hit.

“The conditions in which tomatoes thrive are also the conditions in which Salmonella thrive,” says Eric Brown, Ph.D., director of FDA’s Division of Microbiology. “But the tomato always presented an extra challenge because it is so short-lived. By the time it looked like contaminated tomatoes could be causing illnesses, the harvest would be gone.”

They are working on methods to reduce the time it takes to find which foods are causing outbreaks. There are also trying to find ways to help the farmers reduce the likelihood that their crop would be infected.

Team Tomato found that farmers were disinfecting their soil down to six inches but  salmonella was still reaching the bottom of the roots. They also found a problem with the use of infected water being used for spraying or irrigation.

The Idea of the FDA trying to study how to reduce disease before it happened  seems like a step in the right direction.

Picture : A colony generated by Paenibacillus vortex sp.bacteria. The colony diameter is 5 cm and the colors indicate the bacteria density (bright yellow for high density).