Mississippi Center for Food Safety and Post-Harvest Technology

<p>NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY:<br/> Food manufacturing is the number one manufacturing industries in Mississippi. Food safety and post-harvest processing technology are two important factors affecting the success of the industry. Food safety is important to the health of general consumers and the sustainability of the food and agricultural industries. The contamination of pathogenic microorganisms and chemical toxicants to cause food borne outbreaks may occur at the farm or natural habitat levels and throughout the delivery, processing and storage systems of the agricultural raw materials and food products. Mississippi has abundant production of agricultural, aquacultural, and seafood products that include poultry, soybean, catfish, rice, corn, peanut, oyster, shrimp, and horticultural crops such as fruits and vegetables. Advancement in the post-harvest technology is very
important for the growth of the food business in Mississippi. The enhancement of the food science and technology for the utilization of the agricultural and food materials in Mississippi is the major focus of this project. New science and technology developed will be disseminated to the users for health protection of the consumers, and economic improvement of the food industry.
<p>APPROACH:<br/> For Objective 1, pathogens in the raw and cooked food materials such as aquatic foods, and other foods will be studied by examining the physiological and genetic methods published in the literature. Chemical residues, such as inorganic and organic toxicants will be studied using chemical and instrumental methods such as spectroscopic and chromatographic methods. For Objective 2, appropriate technologies of environmental control and post-harvesting processing will be used for eliminating the pathogens and chemical residues in foods. The technologies include, but not limited to, proper sanitation, use of preventive approved chemicals, thermal and non-thermal processing technologies available in the literature. For Objective 3, the physical, chemical and enzymatic characteristics of food materials will be characterized by appropriate methods. New
technologies, such as nanotechnology, irradiation, and high pressure processing will be created or adopted from the commercial sources to process the food materials to high quality value-added food products. The quality traits of the raw food materials, processed ingredients and end products will be analyzed to ensure foods produced are safe, tasty and nutritious; and have maximum benefits for enhancing human health, such as in the prevention of obesity, cardiovascular heart disease and cancers. The literature methods for analyzing the characteristics of food quality, sensory, nutrition and health benefits will be used. Experimental design: Details of experimental design will be carried out by the scientists awarded to carry out this project. All analytical and processing treatments will be conducted with appropriate replicates, and will be designed so that the data may be analyzed by
appropriate statistical methods including analysis of variance, regression, and correlation. In general, probability of alpha value of 0.05 will be used for determining significance of treatment differences.
<p>PROGRESS: 2013/08 TO 2013/09<br/>Target Audience: The target audience includes food scientists, microbiologists, quality control and assurance personnel, and technologists in the food and agricultural industries, researchers in food safety and biomedical diagnosis industries, catfish growers, and government including USDA, FDA and NOAA scientists, and ultimately targets marketing firms, restaurants, and consumers to provide safe and quality aquatic foods and other related food products. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? The project provides opportunity for training several undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctorates, and professional development for the scientists involved in the food safety, food microbiology, food processing, cellular, and molecular biology research.
This study also provides a PhD student as well as other graduate students and undergraduate students in the catfish physiology and muscle foods research as related to environmental effects on stress and product quality. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? A majority of the project is in its early phase of study, many experiments are being designed and in the process of being carried out, and hence, the results are not ready to be disseminated to the food industries yet. However, two demonstrations of Vibrio test kits to Seafood industry and regulators in summer of 2013. In addition, several papers were presented and published in state, national and international meetings, where the results were disseminated to the related scientists in academia and the food industries. One example is that the results of this work were disseminated to various Food Industry
clients at the International Association for Food Protection annual meetings held in July 2013. And the cheese whey project findings were presented in American Dairy Science Association meetings recently in Indianapolis. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? We will continue to carry out our experiments according to our research plans for all eleven subprojects, including collection and analysis of data, and preparation of manuscripts for presentation and publications in national and international meetings. Efforts will be made to submit grant proposals to the food industries or nationally competitive programs to grow our programs. Some examples of specific plans include Writing a pre-proposal to the University and explore the possibility to resubmit a NSF MRI proposal (for instrument development) that was rejected in July 2013 with panel
recommendation of �recommended if funds are available� Preparing two manuscripts i) the synthesis and characterization of the SERS active AuNP aggregates, and ii) the fabrication and characterization of enzyme self-assembled AuNPs. These publications are expected to be in the high quality ACS journals such as Nano Letters, ACS Nano or Journal of Physical Chemistry. Submitting a grant proposal to NSF biosensing program. This proposal will be submitted during the next NSF submission window. We will repeat catfish fillet attachment experiments to make sure the attachment difference seen between lmof2365 wild type and lmof2365 2117 mutant are consistent. Because the function of lmof2365 2117 protein is not known, catfish fillet attachment experiment will be our main biological assay for characterizing small molecules. After this, small molecules will be tested to determine their
ability to block the attachment of the lmof2365 wild type to catfish fillet. We plan on completing our study on the effects of temperature and dissolved oxygen concentration on the quality of catfish fillets, live muscle physiology, and protein expression in the meat. We will finish this research in Spring 2014 and will submit papers for publication and share this information with the catfish industry through an extension publications and presentations. The publications will be disseminated to various food industry professionals through our MSU Extension program.