Irradiation of biological objects using an ionization beam in order to inhibit conditionally pathogenic and pathogenic microflora of agricultural raw materials

Abstract

The use of radiation technologies in agriculture and the food industry is a common worldwide trend. Global reduction of food products at all stages of production has reached 30 percent. Especially significant reduction is in fruits and vegetables production. Radiation treatment of food products helps to suppress the development of pathogenic microorganisms as a result it extends the storage periods. Despite numerous studies in this field, existing methods of irradiation require optimization in order to ensure the possibility of using irradiation for all types of fruit and vegetable products. This research work is focused on the study of the effectiveness of irradiation of model systems containing conditionally pathogenic microflora by electron beams with an energy of 10 MeV. The aim of these developments is to study the effectiveness of electron beam irradiation application to suppress pathogenic microorganisms that cause bacterial contamination of food products. In this regard, the following tasks were set: to determine the degree of investigated microorganism’s stability and to find the differences between horizontal and vertical positions of the samples during irradiation. The developments showed that Salmonella and E. coli strains were the most resistant to ionizing radiation, while S. aureus strains were less resistant. The difference of obtained results for vertical and horizontal positioning of the samples was noted. When processing samples with studied strains of cultures in the dose range from 4 to 5 kGy, there is an increase in the growth of microorganisms for all processing conditions. In the remaining studied ranges their inhibition are observed. It is important to take into account not only the effectiveness of the oppression of microflora on specific products, but also the efficiency of the installation for a specific sample.