Essential oils as green promising alternatives to chemical preservatives for agri-food products: New insight into molecular mechanism, toxicity assessment, and safety profile

Abstract

Microbial food spoilage caused by food-borne bacteria, molds, and associated toxic chemicals significantly alters the nutritional quality of food products and makes them unpalatable to the consumer. In view of potential adverse effects (resistance development, residual toxicity, and negative effects on consumer health) of some of the currently used preservative agents and consumer preferences towards safe, minimally processed, and chemical-free products, food industries are looking for natural alternatives to the chemical preservatives. In this context, essential oils (EOs) showed broad-range antimicrobial effectiveness, low toxicity, and diverse mechanisms of action, and could be considered promising natural plant-based antimicrobials. The existing technical barriers related to the screening of plants, extraction methods, characterization, dose optimization, and unpredicted mechanism of toxicity in the food system, could be overcome using recent scientific and technological advancements, especially bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and mathematical approaches. The review focused on the potential antimicrobial efficacy of EOs against food-borne microbes and the role of recent scientific technology and social networking platform in addressing the major obstacles with EOs-based antimicrobial agents. In addition, a detailed mechanistic understanding of the antimicrobial efficacy of EOs, safety profile, and risk assessment using bioinformatics approaches are summarized to explore their potential application as food preservatives.