Microbial community analysis of bacteria recovered from Romaine lettuce leaves and aggregative swabs of Romaine leaves.

The goal of this project was to compare the bacterial communities recovered from Romaine lettuce leaves and aggregative swabs of Romaine leaves to see if there is potential to use aggregative swabs for food safety testing. The potential advantage of collecting aggregative swabs over Romaine tissue samples is that the swabs can be collected nondestructively and can come in contact with more Romaine plants and therefore be potentially more representative of the Romaine field. A sample that is more representative of the field could in theory potentially have a better change at recovering microorganisms relevant to food safety. Analysis was done to compare the Romaine tissue and the aggregative swab samples' performance in recovering quality and food safety bacterial indicators.