The public and population's health are seriously threatened by living foodborne germs. It is required to finish the identification of live bacteria in a short period of time (a few hours to a day) in order to verify the safety of the food. Although bacterial culture is the gold standard, conventional procedures are laborious and time-consuming. The development of PCR-mediated nucleic acid molecular recognition technologies, such as RNA-based reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR) and DNA-based viability PCR (vPCR), has helped to alleviate the ensuing research bottleneck. They discriminate between live and dead bacteria in addition to swiftly reporting detection findings and amplifying detection signals with sensitivity. Therefore, from the nucleic acid molecular recognition principal level, this review introduces these PCR-mediated techniques independent of culture for the detection of viable and dead foodborne pathogens and describes their whole-process applications in food quality supervision. This review serves as a useful resource for the advancement of the detection of foodborne pathogens in the future.
