Optical Detection of Food Safety and Food Defense Hazards

1. Develop methods and instruments to identify food safety hazards throughout various stages of poultry and egg production and processing. 2. Detect and characterize foodborne pathogens, toxins, and bacterial threat agents in poultry and swine with rapid optical methods. 3. Develop and evaluate detection methods for foodborne pathogens and toxins with nanotechnology. The funds are to be used to enhance current research conducted by the project to develop and validate methods and instruments to detect and identify microbiological and toxicological hazards, and biothreat agents throughout food processing systems. Expansion of this research within the current project. objectives is considered a high priority.