Institute of Food Technology Student Association/Campden BRI Video Competition Winners

good afternoon and welcome to Food For Thought today's guests are going to be introduced and hosted by Anthony Wilson a team leader within the risk assessment unit here at the FSA before I hand over to Anthony I'd like to remind you all that this is a team's live event therefore my friends and cameras will be disabled throughout the session if you wish to make any comments or ask any questions please use the Q a function which you'll find on the upper right hand side of the team's live window questions and comments will be related to the guest speakers at an appropriate time and questions and comments are encouraged so please do send them through if you have any if you wish to be notified of future Food For Thought seminars but do not work for the FSA please contact the food for thought at food.gov UK email address and request to be added to our external mailing list we'll post the email address in the sidebar shortly so that's pretty much all the housekeeping for today we hope you enjoy the seminar and I'll hand over to Anthony who will welcome our guests and guide the session from here so over to you hi everybody hope you can hear me okay I don't know if I can get a bubble up or anything but I'm hoping it sounds okay um so most of you know who I am but for those who don't time Anthony Wilson I head up the microbiological risk assessment team within the risk analysis unit of the science evidence and research division um and I'm here with you today to host some speakers from The ifsta Graduate research video competition 2022. so this is a scheme that is run through uh Camden and ift um and it is about uh using um novel communication approaches to communicate key issues key emerging issues in food science we have Maria masura here formerly of the FSA who's who's now working at Camden um who's hosting our visitors here today is hosting our visitors on the the Victory Tour I guess after their successful competition um so I'll hand over to Maria to explain a bit more about the the competition and then we'll go on to our first speaker hello uh this is consultant in Canton Bri the sponsor of the ifb competition um a brief video about myself is um actually I'm doing research in English assessment communication for the Camden Bri members and today I'm here with um with coin Grace and Megan the three winners of 2021 and 22 ISD competition and that actually ready to Showcase in a very creative way they graduate research that's great thank you um and first up we have kuntari harinoto talking about plasma for meat safety um hi everyone uh so my name is you can call me coin I'm from University of New South Wales Sydney Australia so today I want to share with you about my research so I would like to start my presentation I hope everyone can see my slides uh with this picture yep things you know 30 minutes if you see our case okay with this picture so I want you to look at the picture and ask yourself so when you go to your local grocery store if you ever ask yourself how has this beat been handled from the farm up to this shelf right in front of you in Australia one person consumes approximately 110 kilograms of meat each year in the meat industry contributes to about 17.6 billion dollars annually making meat safety and imperative factor to the success of this industry heat Safety Not only ensure that the meat you consume is free from harmful materials but also guarantees the Integrity of the product is maintained from the farm to the market in Australia harmful harmful but bacteria are removed from the meat by water washing this traditional treatment consume at least 1.5 million liters of water every day and in the U.S lactic acid is introduced during the washing but this can cause the meat to Brown so we need a better solution so I'm sure that most of you have seen a plasma Bowl when you move your hands around the bowl you see this box inside the bowl what if I tell you that we can use plasma to disinfect B from harmful bacteria so what is plasma plasma is an ionized gas what is an ins gas how is ionis gets different to normal gas let's take example air and the normal temperature and pressure air is not ironized or just simply normal gas when you see the branch of lightning that cracks the sky air is Airness creating plasma and plasma is known as the four four state of matter by adding energy such as electricity we can change solid to gas Sorry by adding energy such as temperature we can change solid to gas and by the add more energy to the gas we can create plasma so that's mean that plasma has the highest energy level of compared to the three set of matter because it contains charged particles that making plasma very conductive in fact Aurora and neon lights are made of plasma so there are two types of plasma such as thermal and non-dermal plasma but for my research I'm focusing on non-thermal plasma the plasma how so how can we generate plasma the name plasma can simply be generated by electricity and it converts Water and Air interrogative molecules creating an end product known as plasma antiphatic water so as you can see that on this picture there are a lot of complex reactions that happen in the gas in the liquid and at the interface between the gas and at the liquid but even to eventually through this process all of these reactive species that form in the liquid they are responsible for the killing the the microbial inactivation of the plasmatified water that can kill the bacteria so then plasma activated water is sustainable since one there's no dangers of there's no addition of dangerous chemicals and two it is energy efficient why because it only requires the same amount of electricity as a single light bulb so then we in my research I have successfully developed a plasma technology that can kill more than 99 of harmful bacteria such as E coli and salmonella in a matter of seconds without browning the meat results show that washing the beef with plasma activated water can kill most salmonella than washing with water alone by using this technology we can save water by at least 40 percent with the ability to maintain the Quality quality attributes of the meat so I truly believe that this research is fundamental to replace chemical disinfectants for meat safety all over the world so that's the end of my presentation so if you have any questions feel free to ask thank you sorry can't hear the slapping at home I think uh I'll just see if we can get any questions up in the chat um there we go so I don't know if we explained at the start so we'll take questions on each talk as we go because the talks are on different topics so if you have questions about Coon's talk then please pop them in the chat now and will and Angela should be able to publish them um so here we go oh no they're both from you will sorry um so I've got a couple of questions I guess so how when when you the the plasma activated water how do you validate a certain level of antimicrobial activity for the water if you wanted a quality assurance process during production how would you know that you've it's been activated correctly I guess so how might you pick it up if the activated if the activation has not been as effective as it might be um that's a good question so I'm because I'm working with my industry partner we have a certain uh deliverables that we need to be able to show that this technology can kill the bacteria in seconds so that's our first aim okay and then the other thing is to show the scalability of the technology so basically most of the research reduce plasmatical water in milliliters milliliters which is good for research but not good for scaling up oh I see and then for this technology I've shown the the increase the scale up from the scale of the liquid volume from 200 milliliters to 2 liters and then my industry partner they decided to to imp to in to extend our contact contract and then to show that we can to make a new study that we able to to scale up the technology to 80 leaders so that's our goal for the next three years earlier and the ideas that you plasma activate the the plasma activated water is then used in place yeah in the measuring yeah and processors yeah in the meat washing because in Australia I recently visited the UK about and I mentioned about they don't use water washing for for clean the car classes yes yeah but in Australia from the consultant that I talked to they they use a lot of uh like cold spray for 30 seconds before they put the meat to the chilling process so we were aiming to introduce plus my TV water instead of using water let's use plasma activated oil yeah yeah okay excellent thank you uh we have a question from the audience uh I'm I I I'm assuming that's cath from microorganic Callahan from micro um hi Kath um who's asking oh no sorry I've gone through it's published now there we go we'll be looking at Camp Le bacter reduction yep so my specialty I specialize in the technology is how to develop the technology and understand the process but I do look at for a look at into the easiest bacteria which is the Eco salmonella but then before I did the scale up study my PhD friend she was looking at how the plasmic debate order in a very low volume affect the come and people look back to Vector yeah she was looking at it and there's a reduction in uh four minutes I think she was she found that there's a too low reduction when you interact automatic failure water with this type of bacteria in yeah four minutes four to six minutes excellent thank you and once the water's activated can you can you store it does it have to be used within a certain short time or yeah so we also look at the effect of storage time so temperature does the way you store your water will affect the inactivation ability so we we found out that you can store the water up to 48 hours or if you want to extend uh to seven days you can but it will reduce the inactivation ability of the water but we found that making the fresh water is better than storing the water thank you and last of all have you a lesson from here I don't know if we'll get any more questions through in the audience other oh there we go we have another question from from Valley will um do you want to do it so this is how easy is the technology to disseminate is any specialist equipment needed or would this be easy to adopt where it's needed yeah so that's part of the uh objective or equipment that in the technology is needs to be easily integrated in the mid industry but we're still looking at it what's the best way but right now I don't have the answer but that's part of our goal okay yeah um and that's for me what made you choose the meat industry specifically uh I'm thinking about fresh leafy greens yeah because I'm interested in like so during my undergrad I was looking I was involving in the spray drying how to how how the effect of spray dying in like improving the the properties of milk powder so then there's got me so my background is chemical engineering and I got really interested with food food stack technology food science and then I I approached my supervisor and he has this project like you I think you can see things that I can develop this technology and then just offering me this yeah yeah oh excellent okay that's great thank you very much uh if there are any other questions then we oh hang on we may have oh we go one more here sorry is the water recycled and how would it feel fine is it in a bath yeah so I also so I didn't really present the whole data because yeah so on my last uh stage of my PhD I look at how the effect of having the Paw of having spread so I look at two different model washing methods so one is immersing the meat in a water in like a container that contains PW and the other one is spring PW onto the mid surface and then uh and I look at the treatment time up to 60 seconds like 30 seconds 60 seconds and then we found out that there's no difference between and miss when you do a short streaming time but then yesterday public can be recycled but uh I need to explore that more yeah okay excellent thank you very much right that's great thank you very much um next up we have Grace Dewey um can we so we'll just we will switch presentations it may take a second for teams to catch up with us uh figgles crossed well it's just trying to present or is it and sorry folks possible technical difficulties it's still loading on the laptop I don't know whether it looks might not look like we're doing anything on the call that we are we can see the slides Anthony but it's just not in presenter View at the moment no it's it's getting there I think the laptop's gone black which I'm sure means it's working um so we'll we'll it should hopefully carry over in a minute I can see I can see the shared version shows that it's thinking there we go can you see that okay that's working fine now thank you yeah hi everyone um thank you so much for the introduction so my name is Grace I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota and I'll be talking about my doctoral research project so there are many Gatherings this time of year that typically feature a whole bird with the meal and it's also around the time where agencies such as the FSA and CDC have to issue announcements about to warn of an unwanted serving of a certain pathogen which is also something that it that peaches poultry and peanuts have in common and this is salmonella now salmonella is a leading cause of foodborne illness in the United States it's responsible for 44 of all confirmed infections in 2018 and chicken and turkey consumption accounts for nearly a quarter of those illnesses so this is because poultry can serve as a natural Reservoir host to salmonella which typically colonizes the birds without presenting any symptoms making it difficult to distinguish infected birds from those that aren't and there are many sources on the farm where the birds May contract salmonella so interventions are needed to limit its persistence within the flock the processing stage is also a critical step because it's possibly the last stage before the products end up arriving at the dinner table or kitchen and although bacterial load generally goes down as the carcass progresses through the processing stages the risk of pathogen transmission is still present Within These different steps and it's an even greater challenge in further processed products like ground turkey and in the United States establishments that produce dominated turkey often have a harder time staying within the allowable limit compared to those that produce whole carcass bull carcasses have much more stringent standards and yet fewer producers exceed this limit and the greater prevalence of Solomon all positive ground turkey may be attributed to the fact that one heavily contaminated carcass can essentially disseminate the pathogen into a whole batch of brown product so interventions are also needed to mitigate this risk of dissemination during processing so my research looks into pre-harvest interventions that limit tylenol's persistence in the farms and lower that initial load of pathogens coming to the processing facilities and also looking at post-harvest interventions that reduce salmonella and prevent cross-contamination during processing so in this regard many interventions have been explored but mine uh investigates two naturally derived antimicrobials that are obtained from plants and probiotics specifically I'm investigating the use of a toughness lactobacillus strains that we isolated from commercial turkeys and three generally recognize a safe plant Drive antimicrobials lemongrass essential oil citral and transomaldehyde so now that we've covered the key players I want to briefly outline the objectives of This research which is to First evaluate their efficacy against the salmonella in vitro and then to study its potential during pre-hardless applications um in Vivo and during processing as well as to finally explore uh explore them with the consumers so for my first objective I wanted to assess their Direct effects against salmonella and to do this I basically conducted a series of essays using the plan drive antimicrobials and what we observed was that they impair salmonella virulence factors as well as growth and multiplication in vitro so what we see here is that we evaluated the effect on Quorum sensing indirectly using the using chromobacterium violation and we saw that at concentrations above 0.5 percent they

interfere with violation production and we also saw that uh lemongrass essential oil was able to reduce salmonella in tryptic soy bra and then the TCL LG and citrol also impaired the cellular membrane of salmonella as observed using the live dead fluorescence assay so what we see here on the top left microscope with the green cells those show that intact salmonella cells that are that are only dyed with the cyto nine dye whereas the probidium iodide diet which is red and at the bottom those are only taken up by bacterial cells with with uh essentially damage outer membranes so it indicates that these plant Drive antimicrobials interfere with that Integrity which may increase the susceptibility of the pathogen to other interventions we also explored the efficacy of TC and lactobacillus in water as contaminated water is a potential method of transmission in the Farms and what we saw was that transformaldehyde and lack of transformaldehyde and the group with PC and lactobacillus was very effective in reducing salmonella in water even in the presence of nutrient broth and SQL contents showing the efficacy of TC as a disinfectant like a bacillus did reduce salmonella and water alone but in the presence of nutrient broth it was a complete reduction indicating that this effect might be due to the production of secondary metabolites and these findings essentially show that TC and lactobacillus could prevent salmonella Transmission in the drinking water which brings me to my second objective which aims to assess their potential pre-harvest application so I want to know if it can reduce salmonella colonization in vitro so here we utilize Dale turkey poults and again we had the TC and lack of bacillus groups and a combination of the two and the birds in the positive control and the treatment groups we inoculated with salmonella Heidelberg and the secret salmonella was enumerated on day 14. so what we observed was that the tree the individual treatments of either TC or lactobacillus was able to reduce single salmonella Carriage by about a log more than a log but the combination of the two actually yielded a greater reduction of almost three logs so this indicates that the treatments can reduce salmonella colonization and could thus serve as an effective pre-harvest intervention the next objective is to evaluate the post-harvest antimicrobial efficacy of the plant drive antimicrobials and for this I explored it's a thickest deficiency of lemongrass to reduce attachment of salmonella to skin and meat so inoculated skin and meat samples were dipped into water that was treated that con that contained lemongrass essential oil at 54 degrees Celsius to simulate scalding temperatures and what we observed is um so the the graphs here the one on the left are from the skin and the ones on the right are all from the meat so the top graphs show that lemongrass essential oil was able to reduce salmonella attachment to the skin and meat up especially at two percent and at all at all three dip times for the skin but at the longer and it was the same for all in the meat and we also found that there was complete salmonella reduction in the treatment Waters except for one treatment at four degrees Celsius and this essentially indicates that lemongrass may serve as an effective post-harvest intervention to reduce salmonella um during processing we also examine the efficacy of the pdas against salmonella Heidelberg in ground turkey and here we observe that adding direct adding direct addition of the essential the pdas into the ground turkey reduce salmonella survival over a five-day storage period with the transomaldehyde yielding very complete reduction by day five that was still negative after enrichment so it indicates that the pdas could be used as an additive to reduce salmonella in further processed products so so far we found that the lactobacillus and PDA they have a direct effect against salmonella even in the presence of contaminants which is something that is of concern for current interventions such as chlorine in the U.S and we also found that the lack of bacillus and PC as well as their combination can reduce sickle salmonella carriage in Turkey poles so and we also found that the pdas were able to be utilized in post-harvest applications as either additives during processing or direct addition into the ground product but then this probably leaves the consumers which I mentioned earlier but so far haven't discussed and that's because I'm current it's currently in progress so what we've observed is that the fsis sampling verification data show that there's been a decrease in seminal positive samples on chicken parts but the opposite actually occurred in terms of the incidence of salmonellosis attributed to chicken consumption so the final objective of my doctoral research project is to target the people involved and we hope to gain insight into their perspective surrounding topics such as sustainability and the challenges that they face in the during the focus groups which we conducted with both consumers and producers so this is part of the sustainable agricultural systems poultry project which is an interdisciplinary research team involving institutions both inside the U.S and abroad so our goal is to enhance consumers confidence and acceptability of poultry as particularly as many of them are now disconnected from the food production system and we're also aiming to develop an outreach program to help poultry producers and other stakeholders so interfacing with the consumers and producers definitely have enlightened me um to their diverse perspective as particularly on interventions we use in food production as well as how significant it is to have their corporation and ensuring the safety of foods and with that that concludes my presentation thank you so much right pretty difficult to remember how many people are watching this video excuse my necklace thank you very much um I will if I stop presenting let's see if we can see q a I don't know if you've got any specific to this one yet so there are a couple of questions I had I hope you've lost the we lost it completely we lost it completely um and we'll see if we can go back and represent that we go um but it doesn't work but then I can't see this I can't see the questions never mind we'll give up on the slides and we'll just have a look in here okay so um how I was quick so so it was that was really impressive and the fact that it was so effective across the board was really surprising I think was there any evidence that when you were applying using it for example in the um it was the drinking water Burns I think wasn't it was that affecting were the birds is there any difference on the posability of the birds I guess or the acceptability of the water to the birds yeah so we definitely oh I've definitely done multiple studies to sort of standardize uh the bird challenges because you know the high stakes um and particularly with this study we utilize a fairly low concentration of transmaldehyde and with the probiotics too we didn't notice any differences in intake of water because for this study in particular I actually um gave specific volumes of water into the water regularly so I was able to monitor how much they consumed within that 24 hour period okay yes thank you um and there we go and we have a couple of questions online ah in fact one of them was going to be mine actually so lemongrass and cinnamon are both quite strongly flavored I guess so that we have another question from Andrew here who's been thinking the same way I have just two percent lemongrass all the fit the flavor of the meat great question and actually in that paper we also conducted a triangle a triangle test to determine whether or you know consumers participants were able to distinguish the essential oil treated groups and certainly with two percent um you know it's very it's very noticeable and I think this is uh sort of the challenge faced by a lot of the interventions where to get that ideal log reduction oftentimes it does affect sensory properties so we have been exploring methods of enhancing their efficacy without having to add as much so in my initial proposal because during that that triangle test we found that at 0.5 TC was actually in

distinguished uh it wasn't significant significantly distinguished across the participants which means that they weren't able to tell which samples were treated with TCO with 0.5 TC compared to untreated um but other than that my initial proposal was to combine the essential oils with high pressure processing because as we observed in the in vitro data the essential oils oh it essentially permeabilizes the mem the outer membrane of salmonella which you know as gram-negative that's one of the main hurdles and the idea is that if you combine that with high pressure it'll increase the contact of the essential oil to the pathogen but also add that physical pressure on the bacteria so that way you can get the best of both worlds kind of the hurdle technology excellent thank you okay um we have an anonymous question I don't know whether we can get any any more elaboration on this but are you assessing the transport and storage of the meat prior to Consumers preparing them so that's just the point yeah um that's a great question and uh something definitely I wish I could I was able to explore currently that transport uh that part between the processor and the consumer we have yet to explore but that uh but conversing with the producers in these focus groups definitely processing at least in the United States is quite a challenge especially ever since the pandemic as they were a lot of these a lot smaller farmers are having trouble finding processors that are USDA approved within a certain radius of their Farms so that's definitely something if we get more funding we I would love to explore too um and we have uh just one more question currently um from Kath which is if your interventions were scaled up ministry have you got an estimate of the cost essential oils initially when I was working with them that cost was definitely a concern particularly for producers you know if they can't a lot of the times their interest in essential oils or probiotics typically stem from you know as an alternative for growth promotion so not from food safety perspective but they want you know bigger yields um uh more effective uh fee to gain feed to weight gain ratio but from uh from P for example for Trans aldehyde earlier on like back when my uh advisor was still working on it it was quite expensive but as commercialization and the industry gains more interest in it there's a lot uh they kind of streamline production which significantly lowers the cost and that's partially why I I also moved away from lemongrass essential oil to citrol which is its main component was because during the pandemic we saw difficulties with securing essential oils and kind of standardizing um across different manufacturers so that's why going with Citron and transm aldehyde the purified products we have a lot more consistency uh we have another question and then we'll come on to Megan if that's okay uh so if I will we oops hang on all right there we go um have you considered if there are any risks involving an increased consumption of essential oils or other plant derived um antimicrobials for example this is why the adopted consumption might become High ah I'm trying to get in the Box apparently um at least from my from the scope of my research I haven't explored that we didn't see any adverse effects with the birds when we did feed the uh when we did feed them the essential oil well that is something that probably is also would be fascinating to look into people because um particularly after the pandemic there was kind of a move where um I saw a lot of people kind of self-treat themselves with a lot more natural remedies and oftentimes like with these essential oils I you know just because it comes from nature doesn't mean that there isn't a certain point where it it might do harm it's all about the dose so yeah that's something uh that we might possibly see but currently because they are generally recognized as safe uh the compounds that I have explored the USDA or the FDA hasn't really seen um a certain particular concentration at which it starts to produce harmful effects yeah great question absolutely thank you right and we'll move on to them before you share of the screen can you just make sure my notes aren't visible it's like they won't be once we're presenting no I got that it doesn't get freezing sorry we'll get there we'll get loading up again we're still having that fish for book we're still having a minute or two to load up the slides with you in a second vulnerability because my uh the PowerPoint is pretty good yeah all the memory there we go right wait please note um good afternoon everyone thank you for joining me today and giving me this opportunity to present my work um what ultimately brought me on this incredible UK study tour was uh my core belief that art serves a fundamentally important and underutilized role in science and I think this Venn diagram kind of captures the kind of scientists I like to think of myself as so as a researcher I see the field of microbiology amid a new wave moment with bio control encapsulating this paradigm shift biocontrol is a microbial equivalent of the enemy of my enemy is my friend it's the exploitation of microbial agents to combat undesired microbes it challenges old schools of thought that germ equals pathogen by acknowledging the true complexity diversity and potential microbial collaborations for the benefit of humanity the broad theme of my work is multi hurdle bio control for food safety um for the sake of time I won't be going over my previous work which centered around a biopreservation system that enabled HPP treatment of high pressure uh protective cultures but you can find uh the link to the paper as well as a short video on that project on my website what the food science and that brings us to the meat of today's pro presentation New Wave antimicrobial and the future of food safety the food uh the food system is in a is in a precarious position we are on the precipice of antibiotic winter a global crisis based on widespread antibiotic resistance where previously treatable infections are now a death sentence widespread resistance poses a grave threat to Public Health Food security and socioeconomic development on a colossal scale not only does it risk dismantling the healthcare and animal agricultural sectors but it'll Force 50 million people into extreme poverty and claim 10 million lives annually by mid-century like climate change our food system perpetuates the very thing it jeopardizes the evidence linking antibiotic use uh in primary production of food to the spread of resistance along the Farm to Plate Continuum is overwhelming to make matters worse our current antibiotic practices actually exacerbate climate change tetracycline used in cattle nearly doubled greenhouse gas emissions in the cattle's manure by selecting for methane producing microbes in their gut microbiotas the culmination of all this is to highlight the multi-sectoral and intertwined to front War um our food system faces due to climate change and antimicrobial resistance we need a new wave approach to Food Systems that balance out the molecular issues of anti-antimicrobial resistance with the macro ramifications of climate change which brings us to bacteriophages the natural predator of bacteria beiges are bacterial specific viruses that infect their hosts for the sole purpose of replication because they lack the biomolecular Machinery to reproduce independently they are the most biologically abundant and diverse entities on the planet and are found everywhere including our food our Farms our factories and even our guts they just don't infect ourselves an important distinction because they increasingly show great potential for some of our most pressing Global issues today I'm here to talk about phages as biocontrol agents for food safety which as mentioned before intersects with public health food security and environmental sustainability yeah uh fermented food is probably one of the oldest examples of um bio control a more recent one is uh niacin a bacteriosin derived from lactic acid bacteria bacteriosins are toxins produced by bacteria used to kill other bacteria it's the equivalent of a microbial bullet which we've used to extend shelf life since the 60s and that's the idea that we're trying to apply with phages replicate by repurposing their bacterial host into phage producing factories when infecting bacterium they're hijacking the gene replication and protein expression Machinery to mat to manufacture replicates of themselves they continue this process under the cells completely exhausted itself followed by a fatal lysine event which releases all the newly synthesized phages while simultaneously killing their hosts and this continues until there's no more susceptible cells to infect which is where we see the amp Amplified antibacterial effect most importantly they can be highly specific which means we can use them to Target and kill specific species without disrupting the overall microbiology microbiome diversity and function a distinguishing factor from broad broad spectrum antibiotics um but that's not all right so phages can be implemented at every point in the farm to Fork Continuum a growing body has evaluated their efficacy against foodborne pathogens across across numerous food products as well as food production environments um about a dozen phage products are currently approved for food safety across several International regulatory bodies um and all this is illustrate how phage bio control can be used now to promote food safety and sustainability within our Global Food system but Pages aren't without their limitations some logistical hurdles must be addressed before we can harness their full potential one of their biological concerns is phage resistance which isn't fully understood in terms of its emergence nor in its methods to counteract it and we find my research at the intersection of these two unknowns my work centers around deepening our understanding uh of resistance using a novel phage antimicrobial system which addresses the issue of resistance by offering a more complete information on counter-resistant approaches um so for this first aim we use synthetic engineering to package two different bio control methods uh into one genetically modified phage specifically we took a bacteriosin from E coli and we insert it into the Genome of a lytic phage known as t7 resulting in a synthetically engineered phage that co-expresses a bacteriosen as the phage infects the cell its replication cycle now includes a production of the bacteriosin which is released upon lysine the only way E coli can survive this is if it acquired resistance to not just the phage but also the bacteriosin we looked at how these two systems worked when introduced to a population of E coli with a pre-existing pre-existing resistant subpopulation and we found that um and we found that both calls and type and ratio resistant to sensitive cells impacted whether the system nearly delayed outgrowth or fully inhibited it moving forward I'm investigating how bacteria evolve resistance against this double hurdle approach and I'm doing that by determining the rate of resistance that arises out of the sensitive population and from those resistant mutants I'm characterizing their resistant mechanism in this phase I'm adding a third hurdle treatment by combining two synthetic phages into a single cocktail resulting the generation of two bacteriosins in addition to the phage a triple hurdle threat as we increase the number of hurdles we hypothesize that the frequency of resistance will decrease um and it'll be interesting to see given our assay's constraint what kind of snip mutations will enable the resistant cells to survive the bombardment of multiple multiple antimicrobials um and that covers the greater significance of my work regarding you know the boundaries of scientific knowledge but to having more direct impact I'm also developing a learning module for high school students based on this to advocate for phage biotechnology and promote antimicrobial stewardship um and this is where information design really takes Center Stage this module provides a platform that doesn't adhere to the stifling parameters the traditional scientific literature it takes a user-centered approach to produce mindfully curated information a consumable fashion by incorporating dataviz graphic design and narrative-based devices to maximize comprehension while minimizing information overload um you know one of the main issues uh one of the main aims is to normalize phages because a major roadblock to phage bio control isn't a technical issue but a human one covet has made virus-based Foods a branding nightmare and consumer acceptance is critical for adoption by industry so getting people on board with the science is essential you know it's been shown that when people are properly educated consumers were supportive and even willing to pay a higher price for food for phage treated Foods um so the rationale behind this educational resource is that it is physically an intellectually accessible to anyone with internet access and a high school education um the research on phage acceptance is limited so I plan on collaborating with Educators to generate some data on the module's effectiveness and achieving these goals using educational psychology methods thank you for your time um and I'm happy to take questions I didn't go too uh in depth with the actual methods I'm using for the resistance assay so if you have any questions on that I do have some slides in the supplement that I'd be happy to go over that's great thank you very much uh so let me just see if we've got any questions live already uh oh that's still essential oils I think um so while those questions come through um I guess my first question would be are there any situations or types of food or environments like high fat foods or low moisture Foods or biofilm bio film based contamination are there is there anything that they just particularly unsuitable for that you might still need alternative approaches well I'm glad you brought up biofilms because certain strains of beiges actually contain antibiofilm activity yeah so that's really exciting in the case of biosanitation um you know phages are naturally incredibly diverse and also in this era they're pretty easy to genetically modify or in some cases um you know the way that we developed our synthetic phage was using a kit that really streamed lined that process um so we do like a lot of potential for playing with their limitations um like I said resistance is a big issue so one of the ways you can overcome that is if um we saw resistance due to receptor we could change genetically um we could modify that Page's receptor and to circumvent that issue um but in terms of um like food bio control Matrix is definitely something we have to consider um and so there are certain foods that this is better for but there's also certain different certain ways we can apply um beige biocontrol agents you know whether it's misting or dunking um based off of the product so there's a lot of it definitely needs to be optimized but we're we're starting to see you know a growing body of literature looking at it from all these angles so I think one of the major things is having like a comprehensive and accessible database or food producers in mind you can see how you know this can be implemented given their needs thank you um still waiting for the questions come through and that's another question would be given as you mentioned I remember that there have been there have been a number of page-based products like at different stages that have to some extent or another got to the market I guess is there anything we can learn from where those products have succeeded or failed or been or exceeded expectations I guess or is there anything we can learn about the barriers to acceptance or the the approaches to getting people to consider favors and autism well if anything I've learned especially from this trip is like the path much work regulatory nature of these things is probably the biggest hurdle I know in the United States um we're seeing a lot getting passed through the generally regarded as safe pathway um additionally if it's a use as like a bio sanitation purpose I believe it falls under like an additive and that changes the way that it needs to be labeled that makes it easier for labeling especially when you're dealing with synthetic phages because they are genetically modified so that's a little bit more clear in the United States I know that the efsa recently gave a positive review for a sage-based feed poultry feed it wasn't an approval but it was very promising for the future of its use being used in the EU um so I think we're starting to see it being more accepted um but yeah I mean there's still some some real hurdles that need to be addressed on on every level but you know it's definitely getting I think it's having a comeback I mean phage therapy has been around since for over 100 years at this point and I mean in some parts of like Eastern Europe it's being used to this day so yeah it's interesting this isn't new technology it's just got kind of like over um what's the word I want to use overshadowed when we discovered penicillin and absolutely yeah okay uh we have a couple of questions here first of all so first is there a concern about release of bacteriophages to the environment that could evolve to Target beneficial bacteria that's a great question so so as I mentioned before bacteria pages are the most naturally abundant entity on the planet so the use of phages for Bio control purposes is a drop in a bucket compared to what's out there already um and actually compared to antibiotics which are a major antibiotic or I'm sorry um environmental pollutant phages are considered one of the greenest biotechnology biotechnology Technologies available today so that concern isn't um isn't nearly compared to antibiotics is much less of a concern um and I think that raises another interesting idea especially in phage there the page therapy application or even biocontrol you know my previous work was was with protective cultures which are essentially probiotics for food safety purposes um and so the idea of using pages to Target specific you know pathogens or spoilage organisms and then pairing that with a probiotic or protective culture in case you're doing it you know therapeutically or for um for Bio control purposes respectively that could kind of fill up that void created um from the phages but they are really specific so I mean if we're targeting pathogens in the farm environment then they're going to be targeting those pathogens in the soil so I don't really think it'd be that much of a concern uh unlike you know broad spectrum antibiotics excellent thank you and we did have another question but it overlapped enough that I think you answered that one actually so we have we have one more and then we probably I think I'm not sure how long people are around for because we'll probably start losing audience in a minute but the final question then is how does using bacteriophages versus antibiotics affect the shelf life or spoilage of the food um a question of the past about holiday truck programs yeah I mean it certainly could be applied to spoilage organisms and I believe I think all the studies right now are focusing on pathogens because that you know it's higher risk so that's like sexier um from like a you know food safety standpoint but I'd imagine it would work I mean yeah I'm really only familiar right now from uh from a food safety standpoint I do know that uh one study found that even like a one to two log reduction in um I think it was listeria monocytogenous um saw 50 diff in like hospitalizations so like it there is significance in terms of that but yeah that's a that's a good question I should really look into that um because it does play a role um and that would reduce Foods food waste which of course has significant implications in terms of you know greenhouse gas emissions and climate change so good question I'm gonna look that up thank you um and on that note I think we're out of questions we're probably just about out of time so thank you very much to our speakers and I hope everyone online has enjoyed the talk uh and if you have any follow-up questions I'm happy to pass them on to the speakers afterwards thank you very much everybody so much thank you and thanks very much to the audience

2022-12-25 08:15

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