There has long been a need for more advanced forms of pathogen detection in the food industry. Though in its infancy, biosensing based on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) has the potential to solve many problems that cannot be addressed using conventional methods. In this review, we briefly introduce and classify the various CRISPR/Cas protein effectors that have thus far been used in biosensors. We then assess the current state of CRISPR technology in food-safety contexts; describe how each Cas effector is utilized in foodborne-pathogen detection; and discuss the limitations of the current technology, as well as how it might usefully be applied in other areas of the food industry. We conclude that, if the limitations of existing CRISPR/Cas-based detection methods are overcome, they can be deployed on a wide scale and produce a range of positive food-safety outcomes.

Textual social media data have become indispensable to researchers’ understanding of message strategies and other marketing practices. In a new departure for the field of brand communication, this study adopts and extends a semi-supervised machine-learning approach, guided latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), which incorporates human insights into the discovery and classification of topics. We used it to analyze tweets from businesses involved with an emerging food technology, cultured meat, and delineated four key message strategies used by these brands: providing functional, educational, corporate social responsibility, and relational content. We further ascertained the relationships between brands and the key topics embedded in their Twitter data. A comparison of model performance suggests that guided LDA can be an advantageous alternative to traditional LDA, which is characterized by high efficiency and immense popularity among researchers, but—because of its unsupervised nature—yields findings that can be difficult to interpret. The present study therefore has critical theoretical and methodological implications for communication and marketing scholars.