Abstract
There has been a recent movement to produce and consume "minimally processed" and more "natural" foods through the use of fewer chemical preservatives. The shift to more "natural" foods has resulted in a great interest in the use of bacteriocins from lactic acid bacteria as natural biopreservatives. The objective of this comparative study was to identify bacteriocins that can be produced in low-cost or no-cost dairy-based media (DBM), concentrated using freeze-drying, and applied to Cheddar cheese samples to concurrently inhibit Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus. Select bacteriocin producers were grown in DBM, their cell-free supernatants (CFS) were frozen, and the frozen CFS samples were freeze-dried to produce bacteriocin-containing powders. Cheddar cheese samples were challenged with L. monocytogenes or Staph. aureus cells. The challenged samples were exposed to buffered solutions of freeze-dried powders containing bacteriocins, incubated at 4 °C for 24-72 h, and plated onto appropriate selective media. All freeze-dried bacteriocin-containing powders tested were active against L. monocytogenes and Staph. aureus. Our research findings indicated that low-cost or no-cost DBM could successfully be used for production of bacteriocin-containing preparations. In addition, freeze-drying was determined to be a feasible approach to prepare concentrated and stable bacteriocin-containing powders for prospective food applications. The prevention of even a very small percentage of foodborne illnesses via the use of bacteriocins as natural biopreservatives would help reduce the number of foodborne illness-related hospitalizations, deaths, and financial loss due to medical expenses, lost income/productivity, cost of litigation/penalties, and loss of trade.