Food as a microbial growth substrate
Food serves as a substrate for microbial growth, influenced by nutrients, moisture, pH, and temperature. Understanding these factors helps control spoilage, ensure safety, and maintain food quality.
Jun Hao Bai
6/30/20211 min read
Food products provide a nutrient richness for a diversity of microorganisms to grow - add to this, favourable temperatures and atmosphere, and you have perfect conditions for food spoilage to take place. Under these conditions, in food, microorganisms can effect the food in a variety of ways. These can be through the sheer numbers that can be reached, to a stage where the microbe colonies are visible to the naked eye. Otherwise, metabolites during their normal growth can impact food quality, and of course safety too. Enzymes produced may degrade food components while antimicrobials substances products to ward off other competing microorganisms can be present, along with vitamins and other nutrients, beneficial for human health.
Dr Philip Button takes us through this area in some detail, in the last vlog post of the month and the 20/21 financial year. Happy watching!
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</div><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Dr Philip Button on food as a substrate for microbial growth. Recorded at the Caulfield campus of Monash University on 26 June 2021.</figcaption></figure>
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