Assessment of the efficiency of virus extraction from food matrices and the frequency of occurrence of contaminated products in the retail network

Express detection of viruses, in particular, norovirus (NoV) and hepatitis A virus (HAV), is becoming an extremely important task for food safety control. This study examines various approaches to recovery of viral particles and methods for RNA extraction from food matrices to assess mengovirus extraction efficiency. Efficiency of mengovirus extraction from raspberry was 14.26%, from oysters 7.99%, from pork liver 8.33%. Assessment of RNA extraction by various methods was carried out. The highest efficiency of mengovirus extraction from pork liver (19.37%) was observed when RNA was extracted using the eGene-up semi-automatic system. The lowest extraction efficiency (5.31%) was achieved upon manual RNA extraction. When RNA was extracted from oysters, the maximum efficiency (33.35%) was ensured by the AutoPure nucleic acid extraction station and NucliSens kit, while the minimum efficiency (9.78%) was observed when using the eGene-up system. The performed monitoring of food products showed that the highest occurrence of norovirus GII was recorded in oyster samples (9.6% of tested samples); the second place was occupied by strawberry, where occurrence of norovirus GII was 6.8%. In the raspberry samples, norovirus GII was not detected.