Analysis of Bacterial Diversity in Relation to the Presence of the Top 7 Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli throughout Australian Beef Abattoirs.

ABSTRACT: There is increasing evidence that diversity changes in bacterial communities of beef cattle correlate to the presence of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC). However, studies that found an association between STEC and bacterial diversity have been focused on preslaughter stages in the beef supply chain. This study was designed to test a hypothesis that there are no differences in bacterial diversity between samples with and those without the presence of the top 7 STEC (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, O145, and O157) throughout processing in an integrated (abattoir A) and a fragmented (abattoir B) Australian beef abattoir. Slaughter and boning room surface samples from each abattoir were analyzed using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and tested for the top 7 STEC following the Food Safety and Inspection Service protocol. Potential positives through slaughter were similar between the abattoirs (64 to 81%). However, abattoir B had substantially reduced potential positives in the boning room compared with abattoir A (abattoir A: 23 and 48%; abattoir B: 2 and 7%). Alpha diversity between the sample groups was not significantly different (P > 0.05) regardless of different STEC markers. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling of slaughter samples showed that the bacterial composition in fecal and hide samples shared the least similarity with the communities in carcass and environmental samples. Surface samples from slaughter (carcass and environmental) and boning (carcass, beef trim, and environmental) all appeared randomly plotted on the scale. This indicated that the STEC presence also did not have a significant effect (P > 0.05) on beta diversity. Although presence of STEC appeared to correlate with changes in diversity of fecal and hide bacterial communities in previous studies, it did not appear to have the same effect on other samples throughout processing.