A systematic review from basics to omics on bacteriophage applications in poultry production and processing

Abstract

The growing human population is currently facing an unprecedented challenge on global food production and sustainability. Despite recognizing poultry as one of the most successful and rapidly growing food industries to address this challenge; poultry health and safety remain major issues that entail immediate attention. Bacterial diseases including colibacillosis, salmonellosis, and necrotic enteritis have become increasingly prevalent during poultry production. Likewise, outbreaks caused by consumption of undercooked poultry products contaminated with zoonotic bacterial pathogens such as Salmonella, Campylobacter and Listeria, are a serious public health concern. With antimicrobial resistance problem and restricted use of antibiotics in food producing animals, bacteriophages are increasingly recognized as an attractive natural antibacterial alternative. Bacteriophages have recently shown promising results to treat diseases in poultry, reduce contamination of carcasses, and enhance the safety of poultry products. Omics technologies have been successfully employed to accurately characterize bacteriophages and their genes/proteins important for interaction with bacterial hosts. In this review, the potential of using lytic bacteriophages to mitigate the risk of major poultry-associated bacterial pathogens are explored. This study also explores challenges associated with the adoption of this technology by industries. Furthermore, the impact of omics approaches on studying bacteriophages, their host interaction and applications is discussed.

Keywords:

• Antimicrobial resistance
• bacteriophage
• biocontrol
• pathogenic bacteria
• poultry safety
• viral metagenomics

Author contributions

Conceptualization and literature review: M.R.I., C.E.M. and H.A.; writing (original draft preparation, review and editing): M.R.I., C.E.M., J.T.L., C.M.K., S.B. and H.A.; visualization: C.E.M.; funding acquisition: C.M.K. and H.A. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

Abbreviations

Funding

This research was funded by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada through Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP)—Poultry Cluster component research grant # J-002037 (to H.A.). This work was also supported by grant # 371639 (to C.M.K.) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.