The specificity and sensitivity of a loop-mediated isothermal amplification(LAMP) method was developed and evaluated for rapid detection of the food-borne Escherichia coli O157 strains.Six primers,including outer primers,inner primers and loop primers,were specially designed for recognizing eight distinct sequences on three targets,which were rfbE,stx1 and stx2.The detection limits were found to be 100,100 and 10 fg DNA/tube for rfbE,stx1 and stx2,respectively.Application of LAMP assays were performed on 417 food-borne E.coli strains,the sensitivity of LAMP assays for the rfbE,stx1 and stx2 was 100%,95.3% and 96.3%,and the negative predictive value(NPV) was 100%,96.7% and 97.1% respectively;with a 100% specificity and positive predictive value(PPV) for all three targets.The results showed that the LAMP assay has proven high specificity,sensitivity and easy operation features in the detection of Escherichia coli O157.It also implied that the assay owned good application prospect in food safety detection.