IR Biotyper® for Food Microbiology

IR Biotyper^® – microbial strain typing for rapid source tracking and quality control monitoring

The global food chain increases in complexity, which accelerates the need for rapid, reliable and accurate testing. With food product safety high on every national agenda, easily accessible, failsafe quality control is essential.

Microbial strain typing for source tracking and quality control is an essential step in maintaining food product safety. Bruker’s Fourier Transform - Infra-Red (FT-IR) spectroscopy system, the IR Biotyper®, offers an easy-to-use method for fast and effective microorganism strain typing, with a simple workflow that needs minimal operator training.

Proactive monitoring

Hygiene control and source tracking throughout food and beverage production lines requires several steps, from surface sampling to analyses. Adequate monitoring of potential contaminants requires routine fingerprinting of the collected microbial isolates for proactive root cause analyses and corrective actions in sanitation process management. Fast screening approaches prior to molecular methods such as Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) helps saving time in setting up a microbial triage for further hygiene measures and prevention.

With a discriminatory power comparable to routine molecular genetic methods, the IR Biotyper^® meets the above needs, allowing for real-time quality control and source-tracking.

Suitable for biotechnological manufacturing processes

To ensure the quality and consistency of the products derived from beneficial microorganisms, QC strategies are crucial in monitoring biotechnological manufacturing. Strain typing of the technological strains is essential to assure meeting the predefined quality of product intermediates and final product.

With the IR Biotyper^®, strain typing and data analyses are achieved in less than three hours, enabling real-time monitoring of technological processes.

Rapid analysis

Tracking potential contaminants in food requires routine fingerprinting of microbial isolates. The IR Biotyper^® offers fast sample preparation of up to 30 microbial isolates in only 30 minutes. With high discriminatory power for routine testing, one full run (with 96 spot positions) delivers results below three hours.

This speed of response can allow manufacturers to identify quickly the cause of contamination and promptly establish a course of corrective action.

Predefined classification

With the latest IR Biotyper software solution, microbial strains commonly found in food and beverage products can be classified by using previously built classifiers or developing user defined classifiers.

Classification models are based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) or Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms, allowing users to continually build up and train their system with common findings in food and beverage applications for improved classification power.

Powerful integration

To maximize efficiencies in the food quality testing laboratory, the IR Biotyper^® 4.0 software can be integrated with Bruker’s market leading MALDI Biotyper^® (MBT) system using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. This powerful combination brings together the rapid microorganism identification capability of the MBT with IR strain typing in a seamless workflow.