---
title: Rethinking Antibodies for Foodborne Pathogen Detection
description: Foodborne illness - Detection reagents
---

[LGC Clinical Diagnostics Blog](https://blog.lgcclinicaldiagnostics.com)

# [Rethinking Antibodies for Foodborne Pathogen Detection](https://blog.lgcclinicaldiagnostics.com/rethinking-antibodies-for-foodborne-pathogen-detection)

 Written by [Helen Webster](https://blog.lgcclinicaldiagnostics.com/author/helen-webster) | November 10, 2026 at 12:49 AM

As food systems grow more complex, researchers need detection reagents that recognize diverse pathogens without compromising specificity.

Our modern food supply is extraordinarily interconnected. Ingredients and finished products move through farms, processing facilities, distribution networks, retailers, and restaurants before reaching dinner plates. This makes it much harder to protect food from contamination.

Worldwide, an estimated 866 million people, almost one in nine, become ill each year from contaminated food, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Foodborne disease causes approximately 1.52 million deaths annually and an estimated $310 billion in lost productivity and medical expenses.1

In the United States alone, the CDC estimates that seven major foodborne pathogens cause approximately 9.9 million domestically acquired illnesses, 53,300 hospitalizations, and 931 deaths each year. Nontyphoidal Salmonella accounts for an estimated 1.28 million of those illnesses.2

Behind those numbers is an ongoing scientific challenge: How do researchers reliably identify dangerous organisms in complex samples and distinguish the target organism from everything else?

**Food safety starts with reliable detection**

WHO describes strong foodborne-disease surveillance as a combination of laboratory-based surveillance, rapid recognition of unusual health events, multisector collaboration, targeted studies, and the capacity to investigate and respond to threats.3

Laboratory detection is a critical part of a much larger food-safety system. Accurate detection helps researchers identify contamination, investigate potential outbreaks, assess risk, and develop technologies to protect the food supply.

The task can be considerable. A useful detection reagent may need enough sensitivity to detect low levels of a target organism while also distinguishing it from closely related bacteria and the many other components present in a sample. Pathogens themselves are not uniform. Salmonella provides a particularly good example.

***Salmonella*: One pathogen, thousands of serovars**

There are more than 2,500 *Salmonella* serovars capable of causing salmonellosis. These organisms are distinguished by the O-antigens they express—an important consideration when developing antibody-based detection methods.4

The diversity of these pathogens creates a trade-off for researchers. A reagent that recognizes only a narrowly defined antigen may offer excellent specificity but fail to detect other relevant strains. A broadly reactive antibody is far less useful if that breadth entails excessive cross-reactivity.

Traditional monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies each have distinct advantages. Monoclonal antibodies recognize a single epitope and provide high specificity. Polyclonal antibodies recognize multiple epitopes, offering greater sensitivity. The problem is developing a polyclonal reagent with that reactivity without introducing unacceptable background or cross-reactivity. LGC Clinical Diagnostics' KPL BacTrace® antibody technology was designed to address that problem.

**Combining broad reactivity with high specificity**

KPL BacTrace antibodies are affinity-purified polyclonal antibodies designed for bacterial detection. The development process can be tuned to produce either highly specific or broadly reactive antibodies.

The process starts with careful antigen selection and relies on LGC's proprietary Encapsulated Column Affinity Purification (ECAP™) technology. ECAP is used to reduce nonspecific antibody populations and cross-reactivity while preserving target affinity. The resulting reagents are intended to provide a strong signal-to-noise ratio and defined specificity.

KPL BacTrace Anti-*Salmonella* CSA-Plus Antibody doesn’t immunize against a single *Salmonella* strain; it uses multiple serovars representing different O-antigens. This keeps a single antigen from dominating the immune response and produces antibodies that recognize a larger range of *Salmonella* O-antigens. The resulting affinity-purified antibody is designed for broad reactivity with *Salmonella enterica* and high potency against serogroups A, B, C, D, E, and G.5

**Testing breadth and specificity together**

LGC researchers compared the KPL BacTrace Anti-*Salmonella* CSA-Plus antibody \[LINK\] with commercially available rabbit polyclonal and mouse monoclonal anti-*Salmonella* antibodies using an indirect ELISA.

The comparison highlights why both halves of the performance equation matter.

Across the *Salmonella* serovars evaluated, the BacTrace antibody demonstrated greater sensitivity to most serovars than the rabbit polyclonal antibody. The monoclonal antibody was highly sensitive to some strains but showed little or no sensitivity to others. The results illustrate an inherent advantage of a broad-spectrum polyclonal approach when researchers need to recognize multiple Salmonella strains.

Specificity was tested separately against potentially cross-reacting bacterial strains. The conventional rabbit polyclonal showed considerably more cross-reactivity, while the affinity-purified BacTrace polyclonal produced background approaching that of the monoclonal comparator.

Breadth has limited value if additional positive signals are difficult to distinguish from background noise. Likewise, excellent specificity has limited value if a reagent fails to detect clinically or commercially significant strains.

**Detection tools built around the application**

Foodborne pathogen detection is not limited to a single assay format. BacTrace affinity-purified antibodies can serve as capture or detection antibodies across applications, including ELISA, Western blotting, lateral flow, agglutination, flow cytometry, and immunofluorescence immunoassays.

Extending beyond antibodies. BacTrace native bacterial antigens are derived from whole cells grown in culture, heat-inactivated, and validated for infectivity. This preserves a broad representation of surface epitopes while providing researchers with inactivated materials for assay development. BacTrace reagents are available for targets including *Salmonella*, Shiga toxin-producing *E. coli* serotypes, *Listeria*, *Campylobacter*, *Shigella*, and *Vibrio*, among others.6

That flexibility matters because food-safety research rarely involves choosing a single detection technology. Different workflows require different combinations of enrichment, capture, screening, identification, and characterization.

**Better reagents strengthen the detection chain**

The science of foodborne pathogen surveillance will continue to advance. Yet increasingly sophisticated analytical technology does not diminish the importance of the reagents at the front end of an assay. Their job remains deceptively difficult: find the organism researchers need to see while ignoring what they do not.

For highly diverse pathogens such as *Salmonella*, researchers must think beyond sensitivity or specificity in isolation. Researchers need reagents that deliver sufficient breadth to capture meaningful biological variation while maintaining the selectivity needed to generate useful results.

Careful antigen selection, broad epitope recognition, and targeted affinity purification offer a way to achieve that balance and enable scientists to build more effective tools to protect an increasingly complex global food supply.

**References:**

1. [WHO Food Safety Fact Sheet](https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety)
2. [CDC Estimates: Burden of Foodborne Illness in the United States](https://www.cdc.gov/food-safety/php/data-research/foodborne-illness-burden/)
3. [WHO: Strengthening Foodborne Disease Surveillance](https://www.who.int/activities/strengthening-foodborne-disease-surveillance)
4. Comparison of the KPL BacTrace® Anti-Salmonella CSA-Plus Antibody to Two Other Anti-Salmonella Species Antibodies in an Indirect ELISA
5. [https://www.seracare.com/globalassets/seracare-resources/pi-5310-0321--kpl-bactrace-goat-anti-salmonella-csa-plus-antibody.pdf](https://www.seracare.com/globalassets/seracare-resources/pi-5310-0321--kpl-bactrace-goat-anti-salmonella-csa-plus-antibody.pdf)
6. [https://thenativeantigencompany.com/bactrace/](https://thenativeantigencompany.com/bactrace/)

[View full post](https://blog.lgcclinicaldiagnostics.com/rethinking-antibodies-for-foodborne-pathogen-detection)

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