**4. Conclusion**

The qPCR came with the intention of reducing the time of analysis and laborious work of the microbiological culture method. The analysis of a food sample performed by qPCR allows the monitoring of amplification while it runs; therefore, it does not need to perform any postreaction processing, such as the electrophoresis gel, allowing results available in around 2 h. Nevertheless, the difficulty of distinguishing living cells from dead cells is the great obstacle when using this methodology as routine food analysis laboratories. In this way, the pretreatment of food samples using PMA (or EMA) aims at eliminating false-positive results, as it only allows the quantification of viable cells. Thus, the PMA/EMA-qPCR promises to be a valuable tool in food safety management and microbiological quality control, especially as a method for quantitative microbial risk assessment. It is critical, therefore, that assays are comparatively evaluated in different food matrices for the detection and quantification of different pathogens and their reproducibility must be validated with intralaboratory experiments to ensure their effectiveness in the intended testing situation prior to implementation.

#### **Acknowledgements**

The authors thank Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz for the financial support. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brasil (CAPES), Finance Code 001, for the scholarship granted to Amanda Teixeira Sampaio Lopes.

**189**

**Author details**

Ilhéus, BA, Brazil

Amanda Teixeira Sampaio Lopes1

provided the original work is properly cited.

\*Address all correspondence to: bmmaciel@uesc.br

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

2 Department of Biological Sciences, Santa Cruz State University, Ilhéus, BA, Brazil

1 Graduation Program in Animal Science, Santa Cruz State University,

and Bianca Mendes Maciel1,2\*

*Real-Time Quantitative PCR as a Tool for Monitoring Microbiological Quality of Food*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84532*

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Conflict of interest**

*Real-Time Quantitative PCR as a Tool for Monitoring Microbiological Quality of Food DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84532*
