Research Publications (Food Safety)

Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, EarlyView. The health benefits of whole wheat consumption can be partially attributed to wheat's phytochemicals, including phenolic acids, flavonoids, alkylresorcinols, carotenoids, phytosterols, tocopherols, and tocotrienols. It is of increasing interest to produce whole wheat products that are rich in bioactive phytochemicals.

Foodborne diseases are a significant cause of illness in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Food vendors in traditional markets shoulder a heavy responsibility to keep food safe in often challenging conditions. Their ability to ensure food is safe are shaped by their knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP). Most research on food vendors in LMICs has focused on vendors of ready-to-eat street foods and not on vendors of fresh food commodities.

The combined use of ultraviolet-C light-emitting diodes (UV–C LED) irradiation and antimicrobial packaging film was used to secure the safety of fresh-cut vegetables. The antimicrobial packaging film was prepared by adding grapefruit seed extract (GSE) and zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO) to a blend film of poly(lactide) (PLA) and poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) (PBAT).

Agricultural chemical residues in farmland and crops is one of the serious public issues that constantly threatens crop production, food security, and human health. Understanding their decay mechanism in crops for accelerating their degradative metabolism is important. In this study, a rice uncharacterized cytochrome P450 gene encoding CYP76C6 was functionally identified in rice exposed to isoproturon (IPU).

Dormancy is an adaptive strategy in plants to survive under unfavorable climatic conditions during winter. In temperate regions, most fruit trees need exposure to a certain period of low temperatures to overcome endodormancy. After endodormancy release, exposure to warm temperatures is needed to flower (ecodormancy). Chilling and heat requirements are genetically determined and, therefore, are specific for each species and cultivar.

Blue light, measuring from 400 to 500 nm, is generally assumed to increase the content of antioxidants in plants independent of the species. Blue light stimulates the biosynthesis of phenolic compounds such as flavonoids and their subclass anthocyanins from the phenylpropanoid pathway. Flavonoids, anthocyanins, and phenolic acids are strong reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavengers and may lessen the symptoms of abiotic stresses such as chilling.

Outbreaks involving romaine and iceberg lettuce are frequently reported in the United States. Novel technologies are needed to inactivate pathogens without compromising product quality and shelf life. In this study, the effects of a process aid composed of silver dihydrogen citrate, glycerin, and lactic acid (SGL) on Escherichia coli and Listeria monocytogenes concentrations on lettuce immediately after washing and during cold storage were evaluated.

The quality defects of hazelnut fruits comprise changes in morphology and taste, and their intensity mainly depends on seasonal environmental conditions. The strongest off-flavor of hazelnuts is known as rotten defect, whose candidate causal agents are a complex of fungal pathogens, with Diaporthe as the dominant genus.

Grassland ecosystems cover around 37% of the ice-free land surface on Earth and have critical socioeconomic importance globally. As in many terrestrial ecosystems, biological dinitrogen (N2) fixation represents an essential natural source of nitrogen (N). The ability to fix atmospheric N2 is limited to diazotrophs, a diverse guild of bacteria and archaea.

Journal of Food Processing and Preservation, Accepted Article. Fresh-cut fruits and vegetables refer to edible commodities that are free from large scale and typical traditional processing operations. However, maintaining their nutritional value and microbiological integrity is challenging. The processing operations such as peeling, cutting and trimming done in the fresh-cut industry can trigger deteriorative reactions such as tissue softening and enzymatic browning.

In this work, the impact of terroir, cultivar, seasonality, and farming systems on functional traits of tomato was hierarchically investigated. Untargeted metabolomics, antioxidant capacity, colorimetric assays, and enzyme inhibition were determined.

Ethylene, produced endogenously by plants and their organs, can induce a wide array of physiological responses even at very low concentrations. Nevertheless, the role of ethylene in regulating blueberry (Vaccinium spp.) ripening and storability is still unclear although an increase in ethylene production has been observed in several studies during blueberry ripening.

The aim of this study was to provide realistic isocyanate and amine emission data when using different methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI)-based polyurethane consumer products. Emission testing (air sampling) of diisocyanates and corresponding diamines was performed in a full-scale controlled-environment chamber during different work operations, such as gluing, mixing and foaming.

Journal of Food Processing and Preservation, Accepted Article. Fresh-cut fruits and vegetables are prone to browning that leads to quality decline, low acceptability and food waste. Therefore, it is of great importance to study and alleviate the browning of fresh-cut fruits and vegetables. Plant extracts, rich in bioactive compounds like polyphenols, flavonoids, terpenes and other active ingredients, exhibit high antioxidant and anti-browning ability.

Journal of Food Processing and Preservation, Accepted Article. In this study, high intensity ultrasound (HIU), antibrowning chemicals (calcium chloride and ascorbic acid), water bath were used to avoid the browning of kiwifruit pieces, and the shelf-life of fresh-cut was measured (two weeks). The treated fresh-cut kiwi samples were evaluated in terms of color, enzyme activities, bioactive compounds, microbial and sensory studies.

In response to changes in their environments, grapevines regulate transpiration using various physiological mechanisms that alter conductance of water through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Expressed as bulk stomatal conductance at the canopy scale, it varies diurnally in response to changes in vapor pressure deficit and net radiation, and over the season to changes in soil water deficits and hydraulic conductivity of both the soil and plant.

by Jian-Ling Bai, Hui-Hui Wang, Ju-Mei Zhang, Qing-Ping Wu, Shu-Ping Mo, Ying-Long He, Shao-Quan Weng, Xiao-Juan Yang, Ci-Zhou Li ε-Poly-l-lysine (ε-PL) is a natural antimicrobial polymer with significant inhibitory activity against a broad spectrum of microorganisms, and nowadays used widely as a preservative in the food industry. In the present study, ε-PL broth was obtained from Streptomyces ahygroscopicus GIM8 fermentation in a nutrient-limited liquid medium.

Peanut is an important oil and economic crop widely cultivated in the world. It has special characteristics such as blooming on the ground but bearing fruits underground. During the peg penetrating into the ground, it is subjected to mechanical stress from the soil at the same time. It has been proved that mechanical stress affects plant growth and development by regulating the ethylene signaling-related genes.

Postharvest deterioration of ginger rhizome caused by microorganisms or wound infections causes significant economic losses. Fusarium solani is one of the important causal agents of prevalent ginger disease soft rot across the world. The massive and continuous use of chemical fungicides in postharvest preservation pose risks to human health and produce environmental contamination.

by Denisse Fuentes-López, Daniel Ortega-Zambrano, María Antonieta Fernández-Herrera, Hilda Mercado-Uribe Growing concern of antibiotic resistance has increased research efforts to find nonspecific treatments to inhibit pathogenic microorganisms. In this regard, photodynamic inactivation is a promising method. It is based on the excitation of a photosensitizer molecule (PS) with UV-Vis radiation to produce reactive oxygen species.

Arsenic (As) contamination in agricultural soils has become a great threat to the sustainable development of agriculture and food safety. Although a lot of approaches have been proposed for dealing with soil As contamination, they are not practical in crop production due to high cost, time-taking, or operational complexity. The rapid development of nanotechnology appears to provide a novel solution to soil As contamination.

Exploiting consistent differences in radiation and average air temperature between two experimental vineyards (Ramat Negev, RN and Mitzpe Ramon, MR), we examined the impact of climate variations on total carotenoids, redox status, and phenylpropanoid metabolism in the berries of 10 white wine grapevine (Vitis vinifera) cultivars across three consecutive seasons (2017–2019). The differences in carotenoid and phenylpropanoid contents between sites were seasonal and varietal dependent.

Zoning is typically adopted by food manufacturers and classified into three different zones including Zone 1 (food contact surface), Zone 2 (proximity to food and food contact surfaces) and Zone 3 (remote surfaces from processing). In this study, environmental surfaces belonging to these three Zones were sampled during food processing in a FVs processing facility located in Beijing, China.

Twenty types of fruits and vegetables representing a broad range of fresh produce categories were assessed for the growth potential and growth kinetics of Listeria monocytogenes under conditions reflecting commercial practices for storage and distribution and conditions reflecting sustained temperature abuse. Whole and fresh-cut produce was obtained from various commercial sources and inoculated with L.

One of the major mechanisms underlying plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) is the lowering of ethylene level in plants by deamination of 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC) in the environment. In the present study, using ACC as the sole nitrogen source, we screened seven ACC deaminase-producing bacterial strains from rhizosphere soils of tea plants. The strain with the highest ACC deaminase activity was identified as Serratia marcescens strain JW-CZ2.