High-throughput sequencing and food microbiology

Abstract

Massive parallel sequencing (High-Throughput Sequencing, HTS) permits reading of sequenced millions to billions short DNAs in parallel (reads) and is revolutionizing microbiology and food safety research from the laboratory methods to computational analysis, with the inevitable use of Bioinformatics. The time and cost reduction of microbiota, microbiome and metagenome studies allows the rapid progress in diagnosis, taxonomy, epidemiology, comparative genomics, virulence, discovery of genes or variants of interest and the association of microorganisms with food spoilage and foodborne infections.

Keywords: Food microbiology; Food safety; High-throughput sequencing; Next generation sequencing; Sequencing; Whole genome sequencing.