Novel Natural Antioxidants Extracted From Animal Red Blood Cells

The long-term goal of this project is to develop an inexpensive natural antioxidant to be used as a food preservative. Our initial target market is preservation of pre-cooked frozen meat products, because we found lot of interest to our product in this market segment while performing customer development interviews. During the Phase I, we will focus on collecting the proof-of-concept performance and safety data for our prototype product. Studies performed during the Phase I will address these objectives:Comparison of the performance of our product to that of most common synthetic and natural antioxidants and optimization of the treatment dose: To perform a detailed study of the efficacy of our product compared to the most common currently used antioxidants, BHT (synthetic) and rosemary oil. While preliminary experiments demonstrated robustness of our antioxidant in preventing lipid oxidation in food models, a more detailed study is necessary to determine time course of protections and
optimize the doze required to achieve protective effects comparable to currently used antioxidants. We will also characterize its potential influence on other food properties important for consumption, such properties as color, odor, and texture in several human food models.Study of the mechanism of antioxidant activity: To establish the mechanism(s) of action of CP and determine the most important antioxidant component(s) in the protein cocktail obtained from the lysed erythrocytes. Our initial hypothesis that antioxidant activity is mostly due to enzymatic superoxide dismutase and/or catalase activity was not confirmed experimentally (see Fig. 5). We therefore propose to compare antioxidant activity of our product to that of known individual antioxidant components present in blood. According to the literature, glutathione and vitamin E are two most potent antioxidants that prevent lipid oxidation in erythrocytes in vivo. We therefore will focus on these two molecules as the most
likely candidates responsible for antioxidant activity in food models.Assessment of susceptibility to microbial contamination and developing the formulation with maximized antimicrobial properties: To assess susceptibility of CP to bacterial infections. Possible contamination with pathogens presents an important safety concern. However, in a preliminary study we noticed that CP was resistant to challenges by a model microorganism, Staphylococcus aureus, possibly due to high concentration of zinc chloride (15-20 wt. %) present in the system. Here, we propose to expand this study to include challenges by the most common pathogens that could be present in animal or poultry products, E.Coli and Salmonella enteridis.The planned Phase II effort will focus on scaling up and design of a pilot plant and collecting the data required for the regulatory submission.