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Food Chemistry 2018
Journal of Food, Nutrition and Population Health
ISSN: 2577-0586
Page 84
July 23-24, 2018
Rome, Italy
3
rd
Edition of International Conference on
Agriculture &
Food Chemistry
N
ovel and potent antimicrobial agents are urgently needed
to replace currently-used food preservatives such as nitrite,
benzoates and sorbates. Although existing preservatives have
protected processed food against spoilage and pathogenic
microorganisms for decades, presence of these chemicals on
products label is perceived negatively by new generation of
consumers. Additionally, researchers are increasingly detecting
microbial strains that are resistant to these conventional
preservatives. Many researchers have screened beneficial
bacteria for natural alternatives preservatives, and several
promising antimicrobial peptides have been discovered. These
include paenibacillin, paenibacterin and brevibacillin which were
discovered in our laboratory since 2007. Considering how tedious
current screening protocols are, and that many antimicrobial
producers are missed by traditional screening, there is a need
to develop rapid high-throughput protocols to accomplish these
tasks efficiently. Few bacterial strains are known to carry DNA
codes for antimicrobial peptides, but several others have not
been discovered yet. Although the capability of strains to produce
antimicrobials is not widely-spread, this capability can be revealed
in silico
by searching (using appropriate software) for a number
of DNA sequence patterns in whole genomes deposited in gene
banks. Experienced analysts can screen further the selection
resulting from these
in silico
searches. However, presence of
candidate sequences needs to be complimented with
in vitro
detection of potential antimicrobials. This involves collecting
potential producers from commercial culture collections (e.g.,
ATCC and NCTC) and research laboratories and testing these
cultures for the presence of the antimicrobials predicted
in
silico
. We also used a metagenomics approach successfully, in
lieu of the
in silico
search just described. The technique involves
designing degenerate primers, targeting DNA sequence patterns
associated with different categories of antimicrobial peptides,
and running PCR on metagenomics DNA extracted from food
or environmental samples. The presentation will include how
these approaches were used recently to detect several promising
antimicrobial peptides.
yousef.1@osu.eduDiscovery of potent antimicrobial peptides as alternative
natural food preservatives:
In silico
and
in vitro
approaches
Ahmed E Yousef
The Ohio State University, USA
J Food Nutr Popul Health 2018, Volume 2
DOI: 10.21767/2577-0586-C2-006