Influence of selective media on successful detection of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli in food, fecal, and environmental samples

Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) strains have caused a large number of human illness outbreaks worldwide. In most cases, the infection was traced to consumption of meats or vegetables contaminated with cattle feces. To combat this public health problem, pre- and post-harvest control strategies are continuously implemented to assure food safety. Thus, rapid, reliable, and sensitive methods for STEC detection must be available to provide confidence not only in the meats or vegetables entering the food chain but also in testing humans with illnesses. As a result, enrichment for STEC has been a critical step in any successful protocol for their detection. The base media commonly used for STEC enrichment include sorbitol MacConkey agar, tryptic soy broth (TSB), E. coli broth, enterohemorrhagic E. coli broth, buffered peptone water (BPW), and brain heart infusion broth. In addition to bile salts, antibiotics (e.g., tellurite, cefixime, novobiocin, vancomycin, cefsulodin, and acriflavin) are used at different concentrations to enrich for STEC. In most published reports, however, the reasons for choosing the selective medium were not provided. Thus, this review was intended to evaluate the base media and antibiotics commonly used for STEC detection. The efficacy of a detection method will certainly depend on the choice of the base medium, selective agents, and their concentrations. The interactions among these factors are also expected to affect sensitivity of the detection method, especially when the test sample contains a small number of STEC cells. Because sensitivity of detection is expected to decline when testing for stressed or injured STEC cells, as is the case in environmental samples, a pre-enrichment step in TSB or BPW without antibiotics may be necessary. Future research should focus on identifying possible antibiotic combinations that effectively inhibit most background bacteria without affecting pathogenic STEC strains in the test sample.