Marta Prado Rodríguez

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Verified

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• PhD Food science and technology
• Distinguished Researcher (Beatriz Galindo grantee) at University of Santiago de Compostela

Listeria monocytogenes is a major foodborne pathogen affecting developing, and developed countries. The analysis of food contact surfaces in food industries is key for better controlling this pathogen. The current study focused on the development, optimization, and evaluation of a rapid and simple method for the detection of L. monocytogenes on sta...

Wastewater processing plants (WWTPs) produce large amounts of sewage sludge that are mainly disposed of on the land. This represents a health hazard due to the high loads of human bacterial pathogens (HBPs) the sludge generally contains. Vermicomposting, a mesophilic process, can reduce HBPs in organic wastes. This raises the question as to how ear...

Foodborne pathogens continue to be a major health concern worldwide. Culture-dependent methodologies are still considered the gold standard to perform pathogen detection and quantification. These methods present several drawbacks, such as being time-consuming and labor intensive. The implementation of real-time PCR has allowed to overcome these lim...

Food safety control is a key issue in the food and agriculture industries. For such purposes, developing miniaturized analytical methods is critical for enabling the rapid and sensitive detection of food supplements, allergens, and pollutants. Here, a novel bioanalytical methodology based on DNA-functionalized gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and colorim...

Olive oil, esteemed for its health benefits and unique qualities, faces a significant risk of adulteration due to high demand and economic value. Identification of the olive variety used is crucial, given the vast array of over 2,000 varieties worldwide and how it affects the olive oil production. Reliable authenticity and traceability methods are...

Olive oil stands out as the top product most at risk of food fraud. The need for reliable authenticity and traceability methods is crucial for safeguarding consumers and fostering trust in premium food products like olive oil. DNA-based methodology emerges as a solution with unparalleled sensitivity and specificity. DNA remains unaffected by phenot...

Video presentation available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCVedA2dEXI&t=1s Olive oil, esteemed for its health benefits and unique qualities, is highly susceptible to adulteration due to its high demand and economic value. Reliable authenticity and traceability methods are essential to protect consumers and support producers. Alongside, the prese...

This project combines the latest developments in the field of miniaturization, particularly DNA analysis, isothermal DNA amplification, micro and nanofabrication into a deployable device, evaluating their fitness for purpose as well as their eventual limitations and challenges to allow their transferability to the food industry. Autochthonous olive...

The presence of undeclared allergenic ingredients or the presence of traces of allergens due to unintentional contamination during food processing poses a great health risk to sensitized individuals. Therefore, fast, and reliable analytical methods are required to detect and identify allergenic ingredients in food products. The use of miniaturized...

Rapid identification of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli, or STEC, is of utmost importance to assure the innocuousness of the foodstuffs. STEC have been implicated in outbreaks associated with different types of foods however, among them, ready-to-eat (RTE) vegetables are particularly problematic as they are consumed raw, and are rich in comp...

Multiplex assays implementing DNA-based methods have been demonstrated as suitable alternatives to culture-based microbiological methods; however, in most cases, they still require a suitable enrichment step. Finding suitable enrichment conditions for different bacteria may result in challenges. In the present study, a novel selective broth named M...

Chitosan is obtained from the deacetylation of chitin, and it is known to possess antimicrobial activity. It has attracted attention as it may be used for treating infections caused by different types of microorganisms due to its broad spectrum. Its application in the form of micro- or nanoparticles (CM/CN) has expanded its usage, as in this form,...

Vitis vinifera is one of the oldest and most valuable plants domesticated by humankind, used for table grapes, raisins, juices, wines, and spirits production. Among other possible fraudulent practices, the substitution of certain grape varieties by others is a relatively common one. At the same time, a wide range of grapevine varieties resulted in...

Several developments over the last few years are being directed toward improving DNA-based analysis to simplify, miniaturize, and reduce the time and cost of analysis, with the objective to allow its use in decentralized settings. One of the most interesting fields is DNA extraction and purification, a key step for ensuring good analytical performa...

Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) is a group of human foodborne pathogens transmitted to humans through the consumption of different types of food. Their detection is mainly performed by targeting specific serogroups by classical microbiological methods and, later, by molecular typing with different techniques. The application of multip...

Salmonella Enteritidis is the main serotype responsible for human salmonellosis in the European Union. One of the main sources of Salmonella spp. in the food chain are poultry products, such as eggs or chicken meat. In recent years, molecular methods have become an alternative to culture dependent methods for the rapid screening of Salmonella spp....

Loop-mediated isothermal amplification, or LAMP, is nowadays the most popular isothermal nucleic acid amplification technique. This technique implements a minimum of four primers, named outer (F3/B3) and inner primers (FIP/BIP). The inner primers hybridize in two distinct regions, and some studies have reported that the usage of a linker, typically...

Background: Ready-to-eat products, such as leafy greens, must be carefully controlled as they are directly consumed without any treatment to reduce the presence of potential pathogens. Food industries, especially those that process products with short shelf-life, demand rapid detection of foodborne pathogens such as Shiga Toxin-producing Escherich...

Listeria monocytogenes is a major foodborne pathogen which mainly infects susceptible individuals through the consumption of contaminated foods. To this end, ready-to-eat (RTE) food products are of particular concern as this microorganism is widely distributed, can survive, and even grow, under adverse conditions, and thus must be carefully control...

Listeria monocytogenes is a major foodborne pathogen which mainly infects susceptible individuals through the consumption of contaminated foods. To this end, ready-to-eat (RTE) food products are of particular concern as this microorganism is widely distributed, can survive, and even grow, under adverse conditions, and thus must be carefully control...

Identifying grape varieties in wine, related products, and raw materials is of great interest for enology and to ensure its authenticity. However, these matrices’ complexity and low DNA content make this analysis particularly challenging. Integrating DNA analysis with 2D materials, such as graphene, offers an advantageous pathway toward ultrasensit...

Acanthamoeba keratitis is an aggressive and rapidly progressing ocular pathology whose main risk factor is the use of contact lenses. An early and differential diagnosis is considered the main factor to prevent the progression and improve the prognosis of the pathology. However, current diagnosis techniques require time, complex and costly material...

Miniaturization enables the development of portable devices for rapid on-site DNA analysis, providing cheaper and more convenient systems for target DNA detection in resource-limited settings. Miniaturized devices for DNA-based analysis are highly promising analytical tools for different aims, in particular for food quality and safety analysis in t...

Nowadays, the application of rapid molecular-based methods such as PCR/qPCR and isothermal techniques like Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (RPA), has increased in order to overcome some of the drawbacks of traditional culture-based methods due to their high sensitivity and specificity. One of the main limitations of these techniques is their i...

Microbial pathogens may be present in different types of foods, and hence the development of novel methods to assure consumers' safeness is of great interest. Molecular methods are known to provide sensitive and rapid results; however, they are typically targeted approaches. In recent years, the advent of non-targeted approaches based on next-gener...

Foodborne illnesses are being reported everyday; thus, there is an obvious need for faster and sensitive methodologies to detect foodborne pathogens in order to assure the safeness of foods. In the present study, the detection of L. monocytogenes, Salmonella spp., and E. coli O157 was performed combining a multiplex short enrichment of 7 h in Trypt...

This study presents the development of a lab-on-a-chip (LoC) by integrating a graphene field-effect transistor (FET) chip with a programmable microfluidic device for DNA detection. The real-time biochemical events on the graphene FET chip were monitored through Dirac voltage shift data from the portable graphene curve reader with changes dependent...

Recombinase Polymerase Amplification combined with Lateral Flow (RPA-LF) detection was reported to be a good alternative to traditional culture-based methods, as well as other molecular techniques such as qPCR, PCR and Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification. The reasons for this are its simplicity, high sensitivity/specificity and ability for point...

Inspired by the chemical synthesis of molecularly imprinted polymers, we demonstrated for the first time, the protein‐target mediated synthesis of enzyme‐generated aptamers (EGAs). We prepared pre‐polymerisation mixtures containing different ratios of nucleotides, an initiator sequence and protein template and incubated each mixture with terminal d...

Nucleic acid amplification‐based techniques have gained acceptance by the scientific, and general, community as reference methodologies for many different applications. Since the development of the gold standard of these techniques, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), back in the 1980s many improvements have been made, and alternative techniques emerg...

Inspired by the chemical synthesis of molecularly imprinted polymers, we demonstrated for the first time, the protein‐target mediated synthesis of enzyme‐generated aptamers (EGAs). We prepared pre‐polymerisation mixtures containing different ratios of nucleotides, an initiator sequence and protein template and incubated each mixture with terminal d...

Listeria monocytogenes is a foodborne pathogen of particular concern in ready-to-eat foods. Different methodologies have been published in recent years, in order to reduce the time of analysis of this pathogen but, best case scenario, all these methods allow for “next-day detection”. There is permanent need in the food industry for faster methods c...

Fungal spoilage of food commodities is still of great concern for food industry due to increased costs regarding food waste and product recalls. Traditional culture-based methods are laborious and require huge amounts of reagents and media. In addition, results are available after seven days rendering these techniques unsuitable for the intense pro...

DNA-based techniques like PCR/qPCR have been applied for the detection of microorganisms in order to provide faster results, due to their high sensitivity and specificity, when compared to culture-based techniques. However, isothermal amplification techniques like Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) have emerged lately allowing the simpli...

Plasmonic nanosensors for label-free detection of DNA require excellent sensing resolution, which is crucial when monitoring short DNA sequences, as these induce tiny peak shifts, compared to large biomolecules. We report a versatile and simple strategy for plasmonic sensor signal enhancement by assembling multiple (four) plasmonic sensors in serie...

Listeria monocytogenes continues to be a major challenge for the food industry due to its ubiquity and difficulty to be eliminated from processing facilities. The DNA amplification-based methods can overcome limitations of culture-based methods; however, due to the stability of the DNA, false positive results may occur, associated to the presence o...

Foodborne pathogens are still a significant source of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In addition to this the current methodologies to track these microorganisms cannot cope with the current intensive production systems, thus novel methods are of outmost importance. DNA-based methods have already demonstrated suitable to address this issue, but...

The olive fruit, a symbol of Mediterranean diets, is a rich source of antioxidants and oleic acid (55–83%). Olive genetic resources, including cultivated olives (cultivars), wild olives as well as related subspecies, are distributed widely across the Mediterranean region and other countries. Certain cultivars have a high commercial demand and econo...

The continuous spread of invasive alien species, as zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha), is a major global concern and it is urgent to stop it. Early stages of an invasion are crucial and challenging; however, detection tools based on environmental DNA analysis are promising alternatives. We present an alternative DNA target amplification strategy...

Miniaturization of DNA-based techniques can bring interesting advantages for food analysis, such as portability of complex analytical procedures. In the olive oil industry, miniaturization can be particularly interesting for authenticity and traceability applications, through in situ control of raw materials before production and/or the final produ...

Escherichia coli O157 continues to be the most prevalent serotype among the Shiga toxin-producing E. coli infection cases confirmed in Europe. The reference methodology to detect this pathogen is lengthy and time consuming, thus we sought to develop a novel method that has low instrumentation requirement, and allowed naked-eye detection. Isothermal...

The authors would like to make the following correction to the published paper [...]

SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, which has spread worldwide, affecting more than 200 countries, infecting over 140 million people in one year. The gold standard to identify infected people is RT-qPCR, which is highly sensitive, but needs specialized equipment and trained personnel. The demand for these reagents has caused sho...

Zebra mussel ( Dreissena polymorpha ) is considered as one of the 100 most harmful IAS in the world. Traditional detection methods have limitations, and PCR based environmental DNA detection has provided interesting results for early warning. However, in the last years, the development of isothermal amplification methods has received increasing att...

Lactoferrin is a multifunctional protein of the transferrin family and is known as a biomarker for various clinical diseases including urinary tract infection (UTI). However, wide concentration range of lactoferrin in urine samples due to the high interpatient variations, requires a more practical biosensor. In this article, we used a novel multiva...

Nowadays, the most widely accepted rapid methods in food microbiology rely on nucleic acid amplification such as PCR/real-time PCR. A major claimed limitation of these methods is their incapacity to differentiate among viable and non-viable microorganisms. In the present study we report the development of a novel multiplex loop-mediated isothermal...

Wine quality depends on several factors such as grape variety, the winemaking process, soil, and climatic conditions. Despite the wide range of Vitis vinífera varieties used in winemaking, only a small number of these have commercial importance. The demands of protection to the product provenience lead to the development of reliable methods to trac...

Purification and concentration of DNA is a critical step on DNA-based analysis, which should ensure efficient DNA isolation and effective removal of contaminants that may interfere with downstream DNA amplification. Complexity of samples, minute content of target analyte, or high DNA fragmentation greatly entangles the success of this step. To over...

Liquid-gated Graphene Field-Effect Transistors (GFET) are ultrasensitive bio-detection platforms carrying out the graphene's exceptional intrinsic functionalities. Buffer and dilution factor are prevalent strategies towards the optimum performance of the GFETs. However, beyond the Debye length (λD), the role of the graphene-electrolytes' ionic spec...

Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT) enzyme plays an integral part in the V(D)J recombination, allowing for the huge diversity in expression of im-munoglobulins and T-cell receptors within lympho-cytes, through their unique ability to incorporate single nucleotides into oligonucleotides without the need of a template. The role played by TdT...

Molecular methods, particularly those based on real-time PCR (qPCR), have become a popular approach to detect pathogens in food samples. This technique may take advantage of hydrolysis fluorescent probes for increased specificity. Even though suitable, this approach loses the capacity of performing result confirmation by melt curve analysis. In the...

The continuous contamination of foods with L. monocytogenes, highlights the need for additional controls in the food industry. The verification of food processing plants is key to avoid cross-contaminations, and to assure the safety of the food products. In this study, a new methodology for the detection of L. monocytogenes on food contact surfaces...

Food poisoning continue to be a threat in the food industry showing a need to improve the detection of the pathogen responsible for the hospitalization cases and death. DNA-based techniques represent a real advantage and allow the detection of several targets at the same time, reducing cost and time of analysis. The development of new methodology u...

The incorporation of nanostructures in optoelectronic devices for enhancing their optical performance has been widely studied. However, several problems related to the processing complexity and the low performance of the nanostructures have hindered such actions in real‐life devices. In this work, we propose a novel way of introducing gold nanopart...

Dairy products have been implicated in foodborne infections caused by different bacterial pathogens. Among them, Listeria monocytogenes is of particular concern due to its ubiquity, resistance to sanitation processes and high mortality rates resulting from infection. These issues make the development of novel methods for the rapid detection of this...

Profiling DNA mutation patterns for cancer classification plays an essential role in precision and personalized medicine. Conventional PCR-based mutation assay is limited by the extensive labour on target amplification. We herein create an amplification-free surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) biochip which enables direct and simultaneous id...

L. monocytogenes continues to be a major health issue in Europe, as well as worldwide. Faster methods, not only for detection, but also for sample preparation are of great interest particularly for this slow-growing pathogen. Immunomagnetic separation has been previously reported to be an effective way to concentrate bacteria, and remove inhibitors...

We developed a droplet-based optofluidic system for the detection of foodborne pathogens.Specifically, the loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) technique was combined withsurface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), which offers an excellent method for DNA ultradetection.However, the direct SERS detection of DNA compromises the simplicity of...

Rapid and sensitive detection of foodborne pathogens in food industry is of high importance in day-to-day practice to ensure safe food. To address this issue, multiple foodborne pathogens are targeted for rapid identification based in DNA amplification. A 3D PDMS sponge was fabricated using salt crystals as scarifying mold and functionalized with a...

Herein, we demonstrated the potential of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectroscopy combined with microfluidics for the detection and discrimination of foodborne pathogens. SERS-tagged gold nanostars (GNSs) were functionalized with a monoclonal antibody specific for Listeria monocytogenes. In the presence of L. monocytogenes, a SERS sign...

Nowadays, Listeria monocytogenes continues to be a major health issue. Therefore, improvements in the speed and reliability of its detection are still needed. In the present study, the combination of real‐time Recombinase Polymerase Amplification (qRPA) with immunomagnetic separation (IMS) is described. The proposed methodology was tested against a...

E. coli O157 is the most commonly identified serotype among Shiga like-toxin E. coli infections. Current reference methodologies to detect these bacteria are reliable but take several days to provide a definitive result, as they require selective enrichment, molecular detection of the bacteria, followed by plate confirmation. Even alternative metho...

Serovar Enteritidis represents 45.7% of all Salmonella reported human cases identified in Europe. Additionally, “minced meat and meat preparations from poultry” have a high level of non-compliance, regarding Salmonella regulation. In the current study, a novel method based on the amplification of the Salmonella bacteriophage vB_SenS_PVP-SE2, coupl...

Accurate and sensitive identification of DNA mutations in tumor cells is critical to the diagnosis, prognosis and personalized therapy of cancer. Conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods are limited by the complicated amplification process. Herein, an amplification-free surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) approach which dir...

Foodborne pathogens continue to be a major health issue worldwide. Culture-dependent methodologies are still considered the gold-standard to perform pathogen detection and quantification. These methods present several drawbacks, such as being time-consuming and labor-intensive. The implementation of real-time PCR has allowed to overcome these limit...

This article contains data related to the research article entitled "Novel approach for accurate minute DNA quantification on microvolumetric solutions" (Carvalho et al., 2018). The combination of PicoGreen® with a microvolume fluorospectrometer is a popular DNA quantification method due to its high sensitivity and minimal consumption of sample, be...

EFSA was requested: to assess the impact of a proposed quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) 'technical zero' on the limit of detection of official controls for constituents of ruminant origin in feed, to review and update the 2011 QRA, and to estimate the cattle bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) risk posed by the contaminati...

Sample preparation from complex matrixes with minute DNA content could highly benefit from the miniaturization of solid phase extraction (SPE) based devices due to an increased surface area-to-volume ratio. However, the adaptation of “bench-top” based protocols for DNA purification to miniaturized devices is not as straightforward as it might seem,...

Salmonella Enteritidis and Salmonella Typhimurium continue to be the most frequently identified serovars among confirmed cases of salmonellosis. In the current study, different genetic targets (safA, sdf I, STM4497, and typh) were compared, attending to their specificity and sensitivity in pure cultures and in spiked samples, in order to determine...

The optimization and evaluation of the performance of microfluidic devices for DNA purification requires the use of a reliable DNA quantification method. The samples collected from these devices usually have small volumes and, in the case of food, forensic and environmental applications, these samples are also complex, frequently containing highly...

Listeria monocytogenes continues to be one of the most important foodborne pathogens worldwide, either due to its incidence and/or to its high mortality rate. In the present study, a filtration-based protocol was applied for the screening of viable bacteria. Additionally, a complete method (enrichment, filtration, DNA extraction and real-time PCR d...

Foodborne diseases are an important cause of morbidity and mortality. According to the World Health Organization, there are 31 main global hazards, which caused in 2010 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420000 deaths. Among them, Salmonella spp. is one of the most important human pathogens, accounting for more than 90000 cases in Europe and even...

Listeriosis continues to be a major health issue. This is demonstrated by the fact that, even though efforts have been made, its incidence does not decrease. Furthermore, in Europe, over 2014 a 30% increase was reported respect to 2013. In the present study two isothermal DNA amplification methods, one based on Loop-mediated isothermal AMPlificatio...

The treatment of gluten-related disorders is based on a lifelong, and strict, gluten-free diet. Thus, reliable and sensitive methods are required to detect the presence of gluten contamination. Traditional techniques rely on the detection of these proteins based on specific antibodies, but recent approaches go for an indirect route detecting the DN...

European Authorities have made a great effort to decrease the incidence of salmonellosis, but yearly thousands of cases are still reported, being most of them associated with serovars Enteritidis and Typhimurium. In the current study a set of methods for fast detection of these pathogens was developed and evaluated. The methods were based on loop-m...

Efficiently detecting DNA sequences within a limited time is vital for disease screening and public health monitoring. This calls for a new method that combines high sensitivity, fast read-out time and easy manipulation of the sample, avoiding the extensive steps of DNA amplification, purification or grafting to a surface. Here, we introduce photon...

Due to their critical impact on public health, the detection of foodborne pathogens in food and water is an important issue for both, the food industry and control authorities. Fast and reliable analytical methods are needed in order to ensure the health of consumers, to easily determine whether a food product has been subjected to cross-contaminat...

Currently, food allergies are an important health concern worldwide. The presence of undeclared allergenic ingredients or the presence of traces of allergens due to contamination during food processing poses a great health risk to sensitized individuals. Therefore, reliable analytical methods are required to detect and identify allergenic ingredien...

Optical properties of gold nanorod (AuNR) particles self-assembled with DNA are systematically investigated. The particles assembly is driven by specific base-pair recognition between single strand (ss) DNA linker and DNA anchored to AuNRs, and it results in the distance- and morphology-dependent plasmonic coupling of AuNRs. The longitudinal plasmo...

We have developed a real-time PCR method for the simultaneous detection of horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus) and mackerel (Scomber scombrus) DNA. This method has been designed to be used as an extension to our previously published method for the simultaneous detection of several fish species. A fragment of the parvalbumin gene was used as target...

The development of DNA-based methods for the identification and quantification of fish in food and feed samples is frequently focused on a specific fish species and/or on the detection of mitochondrial DNA of fish origin. However, a quantitative method for the most common fish species used by the food and feed industry is needed for official contro...

Quantification of traces of processed animal proteins (PAPs) in feedingstuffs is an important requirement to enforce upcoming European legislation on the use of these materials in animal nutrition. One of the techniques proposed in this context is real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time PCR) allowing for the determination of PAPs at various...

The availability of robust methods for the species-specific detection of meat and bone meal (MBM) in compound feedingstuffs is an important prerequisite to enforce current and upcoming European legislation on the use of processed animal proteins in animal nutrition. Among possible methods, those based on DNA turned out to be a reliable tool for thi...

The use of slurry ice is gaining increasing importance as an advanced method for the hygienic and efficient chilling and sub-zero storage of aquatic food products. In this work, this technology was applied as a novel technique for the chilling and storage of Norway lobster (Nephrops norvegicus) – a crustacean species of high-commercial value – unde...