Glycomics could eliminate food poisoning from chicken

A serious bout of food poisoning is not something one readily forgets. Now a team from Griffith University is using gylcomics to understand how food poisoning occurs, and to develop means to prevent the debilitating condition.

They hope to develop a food additive for chickens that will reduce the number of bacteria they carry in their system, thus dramatically reducing the likelihood of them passing that bacteria on to humans.

The first step was in understanding how the bacteria are able to infect us, and chickens, in the first place.

They found that campylobacter, a bacteria which is the most common cause of food poisoning, binds to glycans in the human gastrointestinal tract.

Glycans are a range of sugar molecules that coat all the cells in the human body.

“The campylobacter infection depends on the bacteria recognising and binding to the gastrointestinal tract and glycans plays a large role in this recognition,” said lead researcher, Dr Christopher Day. “We wanted to find the specific glycans in the gut that the infecting organism binds to and we knew if we could do that, then we had targets for drug development to treat the illness.”

Day’s team identified four classes of glycans that appeared to be important to both initial and continued infection using technology developed specially for the study.

“This is good because campylobacter cannot infect if these glycans are blocked or if there are decoy glycans for them to bind to. This is the case for many of the glycans found in human breast milk. “The glycans found in human breast milk have been found to be highly protective against infection of a number of gastrointestinal pathogens, both viral and bacterial.” Day’s team now hopes to mimic this natural protection and develop an effective treatment for infected patients.

He said the research will also help to develop a compound that could be added to feed or water for chickens. This would aim to help decrease the number of bacteria living in their digestive tracts. “It’s estimated that even a 75 per cent reduction in campylobacter numbers in a chicken would reduce the chances of getting an infectious dose of the organism from raw chicken meat to practically zero.”

Dr Day added that his research findings will also fuel further research into finding a means to reduce or eliminate the pathogen from poultry.

The research was aided by a $150,000 Queensland Government fellowship.