The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated “Chapter 29: Cronobacter” of the Bacteriological Analytical Manual (BAM), which presents the agency's preferred laboratory procedures for microbiological analyses of foods.

The November 2023 revisions include:

• Removed the use of SmartCycler for qPCR
• Removed the requirement to perform qPCR without IAC and to perform qPCR on two aliquots per sample
• Updated the 7500 software version
• Added ROX to the qPCR assay and revised the 7500 FAST analysis settings on threshold and baseline
• Revised the stock concentrations and volumes of each qPCR component without changing their final concentrations
• Added extra wash buffer to the pellet to improve the quality of the resultant DNA extract
• Added temperature and time tolerance ranges for incubation of enrichment and agars
• Added optional use of CCI agar and ESIA agar incubated at their respective temperatures as well as R&F agar incubated at 41.5 °C
• Added more figures and detailed phenotype description of the colony morphologies on different agars
• Removed the option to use RAPID ID 32E for cultural confirmation
• Revised the chapter with updated nomenclature of Cronobacter and non-Cronobacter species
• Updated other part of the chapter to improve clarity and to provide detailed instructions with additional texts and figures.

Also recently updated was “Chapter 5: Salmonella” in September 2023, and “Chapter 6: Shigella” in March 2023.