Abstract
Green bactericides are excellent strategies for reducing food spoilage. Phloretin was regarded as efficient, broad-spectrum and safe preservative, which showed enormous potential in food industry. Inhibitory mechanism of phloretin on Listeria monocytogenes was systematically elucidated through integrity of cell membrane, intracellular protein content, energy level, and nucleic acid morphological character. SEM and TEM results showed minimal injury of cell membrane, which was further proved by a leakage of potassium ions, ATP and little protein and nucleic acid. There were drastic reduction of intracellular or total protein and ATP compared to cell without phloretin treatment. However, the specific activity of hexokinase and isocitrate dehydrogenase were unaffected after phloretin treatment. From these results, we concluded that phloretin’s bacteriostatic mechanism is decreasing the intracellular protein content and energy level resulting from DNA aggregation. This finding was prospective to fully illustrate the phloretin’s mechanism and develop it into a natural preservative in food industry.
Highlights
Food poisoning and food spoilage caused by microorganism are the most important issues for the food industry
Unlike the obvious changing of the number of viable cells at higher concentrations, in treatments at 25, 50 μg/mL, the number of viable cells was little change. These results suggested that phloretin at final concentrations from 100 to 200 μg/mL could exhibit remarkable antibacterial effects within 6 h
On the basis of previous reports, this study systematically described the effect of phloretin on cells of the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes in order to elucidate its antibacterial mechanism, which were involved in integrity of cell membrane, intracellular protein content, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) energy level, and nucleic acid morphological character
Summary
Food poisoning and food spoilage caused by microorganism are the most important issues for the food industry. Chemical synthetic preservative applied in food industry to control foodborne pathogens, may cause various hazards to the health of human being (Schuh et al, 2020). As regard to certain class of polyphenols, the antimicrobial properties have been proposed either to develop innovative therapies for the treatment of various microbial infections (Rizvi & Saleh, 2018; Saavedra et al, 2010), or to develop new food preservatives (Alonso & Kabuki, 2019; Bouarab Chibane et al, 2019; Zavareh et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2019a). The functional compounds of flavonoids are regarded as a starting point for the development of optimal derivatives in traditional pharmaceutical industry owing to their interesting pharmacological activities (Havsteen, 2002)
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