7. Future trends

There are two main trends in achieving optimal compliance, safety and food quality guidelines:

• the development of new nucleic acid amplification and detection principles;

• improving the performance of existing principles to adapt them to food samples and/or for field analysis.

For food safety, the main focus is on detecting the most widespread bacterial pathogens such as Campylobacter, Escherichia coli and Salmonella, which pose a major threat to public health and increase the risk of significant economic loss. Beyond the economic loss, recalls of marketed foods seriously damage the credibility and reputation of brands with the general public. During the food production and processing chain, packaging, distribution and consumption of raw or processed food products, any level...