Publications by authors named "K De Reu"

Salmonellosis is the second most important zoonosis in Europe, with consumption of contaminated broiler meat and its derivative products as an important source of infection. One of the many measures to prevent Salmonella contamination of poultry meat at the slaughterhouses is logistic slaughter, this means that per day the contaminated flocks are slaughtered after the Salmonella free flocks. However, this principle relies on a monitoring system at farm level that is prone to false negatives.

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Interspecies interactions within a biofilm community influence population dynamics and community structure, which in turn may affect the bacterial stress response to antimicrobials. This study was conducted to assess the impact of interactions between and a three-species biofilm community (comprising , , and ) on biofilm mass, the abundance of individual species, and their survival under a laboratory-scale cleaning and disinfection (C&D) regime. The presence of enhanced the cell numbers of all three species in pairwise interactions.

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Identifying interspecies interactions in mixed-species biofilms is a key challenge in microbial ecology and is of paramount importance given that interactions govern community functionality and stability. We previously reported a bacterial four-species biofilm model comprising Stenotrophomonas rhizophila, Bacillus licheniformis, Microbacterium lacticum, and Calidifontibacter indicus that were isolated from the surface of a dairy pasteuriser after cleaning and disinfection. These bacteria produced 3.

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Most biofilms within the food industry are formed by multiple bacterial species which co-exist on surfaces as a result of interspecies interactions. These ecological interactions often make these communities tolerant against antimicrobials. Our previous work led to the identification of a large number (327) of highly diverse bacterial species on food contact surfaces of the dairy, meat, and egg industries after routine cleaning and disinfection (C&D) regimes.

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The purpose of this study was to conduct challenge studies in raw pork by strictly following all aspects of the 2014 EURL technical guidance document for conducting shelf-life studies on Listeria monocytogenes. Growth potential was assessed on three batches of self-cut pork chops and one batch of in-house prepared pure minced pork without any additives in air and MAP (70 % O/30% CO) packaging. Pork chops did not support the growth of the pathogen throughout the shelf-life, given the specific conditions used in this study, with growth potential values of 0.

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