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ComBase Bioinformatic Tool Reduces Foodborne Illness

Get More Iron and Flavor Out of Your Beans

New Food Freezing Concept Improves Quality, Increases Safety, and Cuts Energy Use

New Variety Will Help Age-Old Crop Prosper Beyond the 21st Century

A Healthier Milk Chocolate? Yes, Please

Microbe Turns Bread Waste Into Useful Compound

ComBase Bioinformatic Tool Reduces Foodborne Illness

ComBase is an online quantitative food microbiology database that contains more than 65,000 records collected from research organizations and scientific journal articles that helps better predict and manage food safety. The information includes graphical data on how microbes grow, survive, and die under specific conditions such as temperature and acidity. ComBase also contains food and broth models that predict the growth or inactivation—death—of microorganisms in food. This data helps food companies design and implement food safety programs, document regulatory compliance, and test new model interfaces. It saves the food industry millions of dollars a year in testing and other associated costs, as well as helping to prevent recalls and foodborne illness. ComBase, created in 2003, has been hosted by the ARS Eastern Regional Research Center in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, since 2020.

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ARS microbiologist, Vijay Juneja uses ComBase, an online quantitative food microbiology database that contains more than 65,000 records collected from research organizations and published scientific articles. (Nikhil Juneja, D4676-1).

New Food Freezing Concept Improves Quality, Increases Safety, and Cuts Energy Use

Shifting to a new food freezing method, called isochoric freezing, could make for safer and better quality frozen foods, while saving energy and reducing carbon emissions, according to a study by ARS and University of California-Berkeley scientists. The new freezing method stores foods in a sealed, rigid container—typically made of hard plastic or metal—filled with a liquid such as water. Unlike conventional freezing in which the food is completely exposed to air and freezes solid at temperatures below 32 degrees F, isochoric freezing preserves food without turning it to solid ice. As long as the food stays immersed in the liquid portion, it is protected from ice crystallization, which is the main threat to food quality. Energy savings come from not having to freeze foods completely solid, which requires a large amount of energy, plus there is no need to resort to energy-intensive cold storage protocols such as quick freezing to avoid ice crystal formation. A complete change over to this new method of food freezing worldwide could cut energy use by as much as 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year while reducing the carbon emissions that go along with generating that much power by 4.6 billion kg, the equivalent of removing roughly one million cars from roads.

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Isochoric freezing also allows for higher quality storage of fresh foods such as tomatoes, sweet cherries and potatoes that are otherwise difficult to preserve with conventional freezing.

A Healthier Milk Chocolate? Yes, Please

ARS scientists have developed a way to use peanut skins to fortify milk chocolate to increase the antioxidant levels. Peanut skins contain phenolic compounds including procyanidins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation and act as natural antimicrobials. Peanut skins also are very high in tannins, giving them a bitter taste. This means skins are usually removed in peanut processing during blanching or dry roasting. Because 50 percent or more of the peanuts grown in the United States are made into peanut butter, all of those removed skins end up as major industry processing waste. A way has developed to combine soluble extracts of the phenolic compounds with maltodextrin, a starch-based polysaccharide, to make a free-flowing powder that was easier to handle and could control the bitterness. The resulting powder could then be used as a functional food ingredient, albeit, with the caution that the allergenicity of peanuts carries over to peanut skins. (Therefore, any product using the powder derived from the skins would have to report peanut allergy information on the label.) In taste tests, most consumers could not tell if peanut skins were added to milk chocolate until the level was well above that which increased antioxidant activity equal to that of dark chocolate.

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An ARS-developed peanut skin extract helps to fortify milk chocolate without affecting flavor or texture. (Photo by Peggy Greb, D3715-1)

Get More Iron and Flavor Out of Your Beans

A new bean variety, Manteca yellow bean, that is more easily digestible, provides greater iron bioavailability, boils faster, and tastes great has been developed by ARS and collaborators. The new bean variety boils in under 20 minutes, making it especially useful in countries where fuel for cooking fires is scarce and/or expensive. The bean has a mild flavor that reminds tasters of potatoes.

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A new bean variety, Manteca yellow bean, is easily more digestible, provides greater iron bioavailability, boils faster, and tastes great.

New Variety Will Help Age-Old Crop Prosper Beyond the 21st Century

A team of scientists led by ARS researchers and their partners from Peru have created a new potato variety that is frost tolerant, making the crop more resilient to unpredictable climate shifts. Potatoes have become the world's third-most consumed food, behind only rice and wheat. But in 2019, potato farmers in eastern Idaho alone lost about 30 percent of their crop to damage from unseasonable frost. The team evaluated potato species from the U.S. Potato Genebank (USPG) for frost tolerance, ultimately selecting Solanum acaule and Solanum commersonii, both wild potatoes native to South America. The team combined these two species and evaluated the hybrids, selecting those that both withstood snap frosts and developed tolerance to much colder frosts. After years of testing, one of the thousands of offspring was selected to become a new cultivar named Wiñay. In Peru, Wiñay has shown good yields, frost hardiness, and farmer and consumer acceptance.

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Frost-resistant Wiñay potatoes were developed through international joint research with ARS and Peru. (Photo by Alfonso del Rio, D4704-1).

Microbe Turns Bread Waste Into Useful Compound

Food accounted for more than 21 percent (63 million tons) of U.S. municipal waste in 2018, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and a significant portion of that food waste came from bread, rolls, and other baked goods. Now ARS researchers have found the bacterium Pseudomonas reptilivora can convert the glucose in bread waste into the compound 2KGA (2-keto-D-gluconic acid). In turn, 2KGA can be made into valuable compounds such as ascorbic acid (vitamin C), for use in foods and beverages, supplements, and pharmaceutical and personal-care products. Other methods of generating 2KGA exist, but they require additives like nitrogen, mineral salts, and other costly ingredients. Once in a mixture of distilled water and enzymes, P. reptilivora can feast on glucose in bread waste, churning out 2KGA as it goes. With continued research and scale-up, the glucose-hungry bacteria may offer a biobased way to produce 2KGA—and simultaneously help tackle a food-waste issue.

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ARS scientists found a way to make a valuable compound from bread waste. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images).