Samantha Romero-Sabo 
Major: Biology
Year: Senior/4th year
McNair Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michael Konkel
Research Interests: Virology, Bacteriology
Research Project Title: “The chicken you buy at the store is not as safe as you think.”
Abstract:
Campylobacter jejuni is a leading cause of bacterial gastroenteritis in the United States and worldwide. Campylobacteriosis (C. jejuni-mediated gastroenteritis) is characterized by abdominal cramps, fever, nausea, and diarrhea, which may contain blood and leukocytes. Individuals become infected with C. jejuni predominantly through the consumption of food that has been cross-contaminated with raw chicken. This is unsurprising as most commercially reared poultry are colonized by C. jejuni within 2-3 weeks of age, and 50-90% of domestic chicken carcasses are contaminated with C. jejuni at the time of sale. The incubation period for human infection is 2-5 days and requires a very small number of bacteria (~800) to establish infection. Campylobacteriosis is often a self-limiting infection, but it can result in serious complications including flaccid paralysis due to the development of Guillain-Barré syndrome. The purpose of this poster is to educate consumers why proper handling of raw poultry is important to prevent development of campylobacteriosis.
Although C. jejuni has been recognized to cause disease since the 1970’s, there have been limited advances in understanding C. jejuni disease factors. We do know that once consumed and passed into the intestine, C. jejuni invade the cells of the intestinal tract causing tissue damage and inflammation. This is a multifactorial process, where the bacteria must be motile in order to adhere to and invade the intestinal wall. How this process is mediated remains largely unidentified and is a current area of research.
One strategy to better understand C. jejuni disease factors is to compare strains isolated from different environmental sources that have different disease profiles. We hypothesize that differences in disease profiles could result from unique genes contained in some strains but not others. Our lab works to identify the function of these unique genes in the hope of identifying novel disease factors.