Being rich in nutrients, dairy products provide a good environment for the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, Cronobacter and other foodborne pathogens, which poses a serious threat to the safety of dairy products. Therefore, rapid and accurate detection of foodborne pathogens in dairy products is essential to the prevention of foodborne pathogens. In recent years, analytical techniques including molecular biology and immunoassays have rapidly developed and attracted much attention due to their advantages of high sensitivity, rapidity and simplicity compared with the traditional food pathogen detection methods, which are cumbersome and time-consuming. In this paper, recent developments and applications of foodborne pathogen detection techniques are reviewed, and future trends were discussed in order to provide a reference for the rapid detection of foodborne pathogens in dairy products.

In recent years, the addition of probiotics to milk powder has gradually become a research focus. In order to ensure the product quality and safety, a microbiological detection method for Lactobacillus fermentum CECT5716 in milk powder has been established. It was found that the population of Lactobacillus fermentum in milk powder could be accurately counted by spreading serial 10-fold dilutions in buffered peptone water (BPW) onto MRS plates and culturing them under anaerobic conditions at (36 ± 1) ℃ for (48 ± 2) h, with clear discrimination from inoculated bifidobacteria. This method was more suitable for counting Lactobacillus fermentum than the Chinese national standard method (GB 4789.35?2016), and had the advantages of high discrimination capacity, short culture time, simple operation, good repeatability, and high accuracy. This method also included 16S rDNA sequence analysis of the strain for its subsequent molecular identification. There was no significant difference in the accuracy of this method versus the national standard method in detecting 20 samples prepared in our laboratory (P = 0.127).

The residues of ochratoxin A, deoxynivalenol, aflatoxins B1 and zearalenone in dairy feeds were simultaneously detected using biochip array technology. The method accuracy, precision and reproducibility were evaluated. The results obtained that the correlation coefficient of the calibration curve for each analyte was greater than 0.99. The recoveries for quality control sample and negative sample at two spiked levels varied from 80% to 120%. The coefficient of variance (CV) was less than 15% for accuracy and reproducibility and was less than 10% for reproducibility. Compared with high performance liquid chromatography, this method gave consistent results with a simpler sample pretreatment procedure. In conclusion, the biochip array method was simple and accurate and it could provide an efficient and reliable tool for mass screening of samples.