Ever wondered if there is something lurking on your food? Last year Malta reported the highest levels of food poisoning for over four years. Good food handling and testing is key to solve the problem, but our instant food culture means there is a very high demand yet little time.
Biomedical engineers Owen Falzon and Kenneth Camilleri, quantitative microbiologist Vasilis Valdramidis and researcher Sholeem Griffin (University of Malta) are collaborating with Farm Fresh Ltd to create a new method for food testing that produces real-time maps for microbial growth. And this all started by conducting extensive scientific research on… ġbejniet (Maltese cheeselets).
Not all microbes are bad; harmful microbes can cause our food to rot or cause food poisoning, but good microbes are responsible for fermentation to create our loved hobż tal-Malti (Maltese bread) and ġbejniet.
The cheeselet-making process is carried out in a sterile environment, but since cheeselets are made from unpasteurised milk, that is milk that still has its own ‘safe’ microbial culture growing within it, the cheeselets would still develop by growing microbe colonies.
In this fast-paced society, the search for the freshest produce increases
Using this new method, the cheeselets are scanned using a special type of light and the light emission is recorded. This creates a bunch of data which is translated using algorithms (designed by the team) into something understandable. The scanning process can identify clean from contaminated cheese, and even specific organisms, which may be ‘bad for business’.
So why is this research important? As cheesy as this all sounds, this technique has the potential to revolutionise the current food-testing processes.
In this fast-paced society, the search for the freshest produce increases together with the demand for instant results. Thanks to ġbejniet they may have found a new method to ease this demand and prevent microbe-caused food poisoning.
The full article is available on the University’s research magazine Think (Issue 26): www.um.edu.mt/think/whats-lurking-on-your-lunch/.
Did you know?
• Toilets flush in the note of E flat.
• Pixar accidently deleted Toy Story 2 while they were halfway through making it.
• The population of Iceland is so small, an app was developed to check that people are not related before relationships became too serious.
• Pineapples have an enzyme that dissolves human flesh, that is why your mouth tingles after eating it.
• In the west African language of Fulah, they call a computer crash ‘hookii’ which literally means ‘a cow falling over but not dying’.
For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think
Sound bites
• Researchers report that the conditions in deep space – exposure to chronic, low-dose radiation – can cause problems in mice brains and behaviour. These results show how safety measures need to be created for astronauts to protect the brain from radiation during deep space missions, such as travellingto Mars.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805134017.htm
• Researchers are developing a new model in zebrafish to test drugs like Aspirin called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID). They tested more than 20 drugs to study chemical injury in the gut. What they found was unexpected: the surface cell layer of the gut was being removed as a defence mechanism against a molecule that inhibited drug-resistance pumps in cells, which normally protect them.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190805155920.htm
For more science news, listen to Radio Mocha on Radju Malta and www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/