Food and Beverages

Biography

Biography: Andy Senecal

Abstract

Foodborne outbreaks involving fresh produce, generally procured locally, is a concern to the United States Military deployed worldwide to countries that lack food sanitation standards and enforcement resulting in an increase potential for food-borne disease outbreaks. Novel natural strategies to eliminate food pathogens on fresh produce are a need for both military and civilian use. An old anti-pathogen technology that has recently emerged as a novel, natural method for improving produce safety is bacteriophages. Bacteriophages are naturally occurring predators of bacteria that reduce the levels of their specifically-targeted pathogenic bacteria. The Army has worked with industry to develop a series of lytic bacteriophage cocktails specific against Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Shigella. Because phage do not kill 100% of their host, methods were developed where phage was combined with commercial wash treatments to increase the effectiveness of these washes especially in the presences of elevated organic materials. Presently bacteriophage are sold as concentrated, aqueous, phage preparations that must be stored refrigerated (2-8°C) and diluted with clean water prior to application. Due to the cost of shipping liquid products around the world, the Army recently has investigated strategies for drying and increasing the shelf-life of phage cocktails at room temperature. Electrospinning and freeze drying studies with different excipients were conducted and demonstrated potential promise for storing phage at room temperature for extended periods.

Fig. Effect of temperature (20°C, 4°C,-20°C) on bacteriophage viability after 8 weeks of storage at 1% RH.  All data points are calculated mean values (n=6) with error bars representing the standard deviations.