The World Health Organization reports that more than 70% of characterized emerging infectious agents have zoonotic transmission. For emerging bacterial pathogens, transmission via food of animal origin must be taken into account. However, with current analysis methods and strategies in clinical and food microbiology, these are not picked up. Causes of this are the introduction of culture-independent methods that often have insufficient identification depth and the inability to detect low numbers of pathogens, as well as an increasingly advanced selectivity and specificity of culture-dependent methods. As a result, only known pathogens are screened and (phenotypically) abnormal isolates are no longer isolated or identified. This project  focuses on the emerging bacterial zoonoses Campylobacter concisus, C. curvus, and C. rectus, Proteus mirabilis and Escherichia albertii because scientific data justify their urgency in their role as causative agents of gastroenteritis. In addition, patients with chronic gastrointestinal disorders show a dysbiosis with an increased occurrence of Proteobacteria, including the above-mentioned pathogens. However, the sources of contamination have not been sufficiently studied, and Belgian and by extension European data on dietary prevalence is very limited or non-existent. In this project, through a combination of an innovative culture-independent approach combined with different culture-dependent methods, the occurrence of these pathogens and their virulence and AB-resistance potential will be determined and compared with circulating human strains. In addition, the predictive value in the tracing of emerging pathogens from a recently developed gene pool analysis will be evaluated.