Survival and polymerase chain reaction-based detection of nucleic acid taggant markers during bacterial growth and sterilization

Nucleic acid taggants can potentially be used to identify, track, and attribute microbiologicals, including genetically-modified organisms or pathogens. We propose to introduce nucleic acid taggants into bacterial media, and to then recover the taggants in sterilized bacterial waste. Surprisingly, many of the steps that might be suspected to degrade the detection of a nucleic acid taggant, such as autoclaving, bacterial growth, and chemical sterilization by bleach, have relatively little effect on taggant recovery. We can detect as little as 1000 taggants per milliliter of media. Sterilization methods affect this value by less than 100-fold. The most significant affect on taggant recovery was bacterial growth: in the presence of B. subtilis taggant recovery was reduced by 430-fold, while E. coli reduced taggant recovery by only five-fold. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.