**Abstract**

Developing countries due to socio-economic conditions are more prone to frequent pathogenic outbreaks; inadequate sanitation and water quality monitoring are also responsible for such conditions. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to provide microbiologically safe food/water in order to protect public health. Several flaws in traditional culturing methods have sparked a surge in interest in molecular techniques as a means of improving the efficiency and sensitivity of microbiological food/water quality monitoring. Molecular identification of water contaminants, mainly *Escherichia coli*, has been extensively used. Several of the molecular-based techniques are based on amplification and detection of nucleic acids. The advantages offered by these PCR-based methods over culture-based techniques are a higher level of specificity, sensitivity, and rapidity. Of late, the development of a biosensor device that is easy to perform, highly sensitive, and selective has the potential to become indispensable in detecting low CFU of pathogenic *E. coli* in environmental samples. This review seeks to provide a vista of the progress made in the detection of *E. coli* using nucleic acid-based approaches as part of the microbiological food/water quality monitoring.

**Keywords:** molecular diagnostics, *E. coli*, PCR, LAMP, CRISPR
