HEALTH  PROMOTION  AND  IMPROVED  SAFETY  THROUGH  PROCESSED  FOODS

Project Goal

    To identify, understand, stabilize and improve the action of health-promoting substances in processed foods, and to develop strategies to improve food safety by understanding microbial spoilage and developing active systems preventing it, in order to render foods better for the human health and give a strategic advantage to New Jersey food industries.

Directions of investigation

• To identify and stabilize health promoting substances in processed foods
• To understand mechanisms of microbial spoilage which cause loss of food quality and to develop strategies to detect, monitor, quantify and inactivate microbial populations to improve food safety
• To identify anti-inflammatory substances in raw and processed grains and beans such as whole wheat, buckwheat, quinoa and cocoa beans.  This will be accomplished by examining their mechanisms of action at the molecular genetic level, specifically, their action on gene expression of key inflammation mediators.
• To isolate pure phytochemicals from unprocessed and processed quinoa, buck wheat, wheat bran, rice bran, oat, cocoa powder and tomato and submit them for call signal transduction and genomic-based anti-inflammatory and/or antioxidative assay

• To provide chemically defined fraction from processed foods to biological group for bioactivity assay.
• To study thermal and oxidative transformation of selected phytochemicals in foods.
• To model the kinetics of isomerization and degradation of Lycopene (and other carotenoids) in tomato-based products due to processing and storage and in lycopene fortified systems.
• •To optimize (for maximum Lycopene retention) the processing and storage conditions of various tomato products, e.g. sauce, paste, jam, pasta, jam, baked products, canned products, extruded products.
• To genetically engineer the soybean isoflavone synthase into Russet Burbank potato plants for the addition of nutraceutical values.  A heterologous Arabidopsis in potato tubers has been successfully transferred.  Since isoflavone synthase is limited in legumes and the gene seems to express through soybean seedlings, the expression of this heterologous soybean isoflavone synthase in potato is very possible.  We plan to first clone the soybean isoflavone synthase gene, and then genetically engineered it into potato through the Agrobacterium mediated transformation techniques.
• To investigate the mechanisms for the influence of spore inoculum size on C. botulinum germination and growth.  We hypothesize that the existence of germination time distributions explains, in part, the variability in lag time.  The inoculum size effect is also attributed to quorum sensing among spores though extracellular signaling molecules. 
• To optimize the process variables for controlling the release of nisin from nisin-containing films.