Im looking for proof of concept papers in this particular matter as we are trying to do an experimental approach for a competition and want to know the state-of-the-art technologies that are being used. I would appreciate any thoughts, help or guidance. Thank you in advance for your time and precious time.
There are lots of papers published in Meat Science with following website:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleListURL&_method=list&_ArticleListID=-720458756&_sort=r&_st=13&view=c&md5=d69725eaad2118a2fae9ce7335911f01&searchtype=a
I am not sure what you mean by 'synthetic phages'? Do you mean, bacteriophages that are harvested manually from bacteria or recombinant DNA-based bacteriophages? Presuming the former, the use of bacteriophages as a food preservative faces a difficult challenge in that the lytic bacteriophages that are generated on a particular host are subject to restriction modification by that host whereby the phage DNA is modified and not considered 'foreign' and not degraded. That is the main problem....the recovered bacteriophage work best on that one host strain, likely showing a very high efficiency of plaquing (EOP). The problem is, as a food preservative, the antimicrobial ( i.e., bacteriophage) should work equally well on all targeted strains, such as E. coli O157:H7 for instance. If it is propagated on 1 strain of E. coli O157:H7, it should work on all E. coli O157:H7 strains and not just work well on the 1 strain it was propagated on. Otherwise it renders the preservative with little or no effect in practical commercial application. Aside from that problem, is the problem with 'inhibition kinetics'....bacteriophage are relatively large particles (compared to acid chemical antimicrobial molecules like lactic acid), they are finite in number and therefore as they interact with the food matrix, they are 'tittered out of solution' so to speak and the amount remaining is that much less, and also they require a direct contact and injection of their DNA into the targeted host bacteria, so it would likely only have application on the surface of a food, not after it is mixed into a food (like ground beef) where the food matrix may bind and complex with bacteriophage particles, or coat/cover/conceal targeted bacteria. So even on the surface of a food, what kind of titer is required in solution to provide coverage of the surface with bacteriophage no further apart from each other than the length of a bacterial cell?....since once they land on a surface, they are not planktonic anymore and are somewhat fixed in position. Good luck.
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