Microbial inactivation by high-pressure

Abstract

High-pressure treatments are receiving a great deal of attention for the inactivation of micro-organisms in foodstuff processing, pressure instead of temperature is used as stabilizing factor. In this context, high hydrostatic pressure treatment is the most studied alternative process, many works reported successful results in inactivating a wide range of micro-organisms under different operative conditions such as temperature, cycles of pressure, exposure time. Furthermore, a number of processes using high pressure treatment (HPT) has already been put into the market. Nevertheless this new technology presents the main limitation to be very expensive and difficult to control and manage because of the extremely high pressure employed, so that the widespread industrial diffusion in industry field appears cumbersome. The treatment with supercritical CO 2 could become a relevant alternative to HPT in the field of microbial inactivation of food as well as an innovative technique for the sterilization of thermally and hydrolytically sensitive polymeric materials in biomedical applications, such as polymeric particles for drug delivery or polymeric implants. It has been demonstrated that the effect of microbial inactivation assuring healthy food preservation is already consistent at pressures moderated (lower than 200 bar) when compared with those employed by traditional hydrostatic-pressure HPT methods (2000–7000 bar). In this work the anti-microbial potential of compressed CO 2 was investigated against gram-negative bacteria, gram-positive bacteria and spores; as model species, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacillus subtilis and spores of B. subtilis were used. The experiments were performed in a semi-continous apparatus at different but mild operative conditions. Excellent results were obtained for micro-organisms, under appropriate conditions the survival ratio of bacteria could be reduced to about seven orders of magnitude. Inactivation of spores under the same conditions, found to be conflicting in open literature, was not satisfactory. Spore inactivation was possible by coupling combination of higher temperature and longer contact time conditions. The application of pressure cycles was also found to be beneficial.