Merck and Bioscience Event
After 2.5 years of pandemic, we finally had our first physical event in July 2022 – Food Safety 4.0 Enter the new Era of Sample & Media Preparations, jointly organised with Merck Singapore.
We had Dr Barbara Gerten, Senior Scientist of Merck KGaA, to present “Sample preparation: An essential pre-requisite for high-quality microbiological analysis”. Dr Barbara presented in length about background of ISO 6887 series, general and specific rules for different samples, diluents and their performance testing, compositing and pooling procedures; and validation of larger test portion size.
Questions asked by participants were about Buffered Peptone Water (BPW), the most widely used diluent in microbiology. If BPW is used for Salmonella testing, only qualitative performance test is needed while quantitative performance test is not needed. Another question was about usage of Ringer’s solution, where Dr Barbara pointed out in ISO 6887-1:2017 that Ringer’s solution is for milk and milk products, not for meat and meat products testing.
In this event, the Ready Stream® was launched, and Merck Biomonitoring products mainly the Biocontrol MVP Icon, Genetic Detection System (GDS) for foodborne pathogens testing, Simplates, VIP Gold, Flash were displayed. To make the event livelier we had Kahoot Games and quizzes.
