6533b82efe1ef96bd129389f

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Effects of high pressure processing and biopreservation on the inactivation and the germination of spores of Bacillus and Clostridium

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description

Bacterial endospores are one of the most resistant life form on earth. Their capacity to survive to decontamination processes and their potential pathogenicity represent a real problem for the food industry. Currently, the only way to prevent their development in foods is the application of thermal treatments or the use of preservatives. However, these two methods have negative impacts on the nutritional properties of foods and on the consumers’ health. High hydrostatic pressure (HP) is a non-thermal process widely used for commercial pasteurization of foods. However, this process has a very low effect on spores and has therefore to be combined with other decontamination processes to enhance its effectiveness. The objective of this work was to evaluate the potential of the use of biopreservation as an additional hurdle for the inactivation of thermoresistant and pathogenic foodborne spores by HP. Biopreservation is a gentle decontamination process involving protective culture or the antimicrobial agents they produce, like nisin. Thanks to global investigation methods such as microspectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy or circular dichroism, this study showed that HP treatment could affect the antimicrobial properties of nisin. By affecting the secondary structures of this protein, HP can induce a drastic drop in its antimicrobial activity. However when added in the recovery medium of HP-treated spores, nisin can induce their synergistic inactivation (> 7log). This HP-sensitization of spore to nisin is due to the induction of the very first steps of the germination process, usually not detected by the current methods of germination analysis. These results bring knew knowledges about the underlying mechanisms of spores germination under HP and gives new perspectives for the combined used of HP and nisin at the industrial scale.