Food-borne bacterial pathogens are a major cause of illness, hospitalization and death all over the world. It is a crucial part of any food safety plan to detect microorganisms in food. In comparison to traditional methods, modern molecular techniques have more superiority in detecting, typing and characterizing of bacterial pathogens. Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) is considered to be a powerful subtyping technique to distinguish bacterial species and strains at the genetic level. In this study, five food-borne bacterial pathogens, including Shigella dysentery, Staphylococcus aureus, Vibrio cholerae, Salmonella Enteritidis and E. coli, by applying single enzyme AFLP (SE-AFLP), a modified AFLP method, are tested. This method is optimized and standardized as a fingerprinting model for the identification and differentiation between all five pathogenic bacteria. Our results showed that by carefully designing primers for amplification of DNA fragments in performing SE-AFLP method, we can obtain a rapid, reliable and optimized method in order to facilitate the identification of food-borne pathogenic bacterial species tested.
