The persistence of<i>Salmonella</i>following desiccation under feed processing environmental conditions: a subject of relevance

Abstract

While Salmonella has been shown to persist for years in feed processing environments, it is still unknown how temperature and humidity affect the persistence of Salmonella cells over time in terms of their metabolic states and cultivability. Here, we show that long-term exposure to feed processing environmental conditions induces Salmonella into a nonculturable state even though about 1% of the population remains metabolically active. This has significant implications when monitoring Salmonella from the environment which could yield false-negative results using conventional pre-enrichment detection methods.