The World Health Organization reports that more than 70% of the characterized emerging infectious agents have a zoonotic transmission. For emerging bacterial pathogens, transmission via food of animal origin must be taken into account. However, these are not picked up with the current analysis methods and strategies in clinical and food microbiology. 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, and in addition the increasingly increased selectivity and specificity of culture-dependent methods. As a result, only known pathogens are screened for, and (phenotypically) divergent isolates are no longer further isolated or identified.

In this project proposal, research is conducted into various emerging bacterial zoonoses to evaluate their risk as a cause of gastroenteritis. By combining an innovative culture-independent approach with various culture-dependent methods, the occurrence of these pathogens and their virulence and AB resistance potential will be determined and compared with human circulating strains. In addition, the predictive value of a recently developed gene pool analysis in the tracking of emerging pathogens will be evaluated.