The work of Biomedical Sciences (Medical Microbiology) MSc student Salina Thapa, in collaboration with her supervisor Dr Manal Mohammed, has recently been published in the peer-reviewed journal ‘One Health Outlook of BioMed Central’ about her research on salmonella outbreaks.
Salmonella is one of the most common foodborne diseases worldwide which has been associated with invasive bacterial infections in humans such as septicaemia and meningitis. Human outbreaks of non-typhoidal salmonellosis were reported worldwide.
Conventional laboratory methods have their limitations in investigation of outbreaks, therefore it is crucial to use accurate methods for outbreak investigation such as whole genome sequence methods using next generation technologies.
Salina and Dr Mohammed’s work in their paper entitled ‘Evaluation of WGS-subtyping methods for epidemiological surveillance of foodborne salmonellosis’ draws in on evaluating different methods for investigations of Salmonella outbreaks by using next generation sequencing technologies and associated bioinformatics and computational tools.
Talking about the research, Dr Manal Mohammed said: “I am so proud of Salina’s interesting findings during her MSc project. Foodborne salmonellosis is an important concern for public health worldwide therefore, it is crucial to use accurate, reliable and highly discriminative subtyping methods for epidemiological surveillance and outbreak investigation.
“In this study, we showed that SNP-based analyses have the ability to confirm the occurrence of the outbreak and provide definitive evidence of the source of the outbreak in real-time. There is no doubt that next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies that have made whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of foodborne bacterial pathogens a realistic and superior alternative to traditional laboratory methods.”
As a result of her work, Salina was selected to present her research at the Microbiology Society annual conference in Belfast last year.
Read the full paper on the BioMed Central website.
