Research Projects

Food safety draws considerable attention in the modern pace of the world owing to rapidly changing food recipes and food habits. Foodborne illnesses associated with pathogens, toxins, and other contaminants pose a serious threat to human health. Even though a variety of preservatives have been developed to inhibit the growth of food born microbes, demand for natural antimicrobial agents is increasing due to consumer's concern on health issues. Green surfactants namely RLs sLs are a class of low molecular weight glycolipids, which are mainly obtained from Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida bombicola respectively. Utilization of these amphiphiles in the field of food processing, agricultural, cosmetics and pharmaceutical are considerable interest in recent years because of their unique properties such as biocompatibility, ionic strength, antiadhesive, antimicrobial and biofilm disrupting activity and ability to uphold the difference pH. since RLs is a hydrophilic surfactant and sLs is a hydrophobic surfactant which showed limited activity against some Gram-negative and Gram positive bacteria and fungi as compared to commonly used chemical preservatives. Therefore, research on the design and development of RLs and sLs is still in its infancy and further advances are needed for the successful transformation of academic research into commercial formulations. Therefore, surface functionalization provides an innovative approach to enhance the amphiphilicity of biosurfactants, accordingly the physicochemical properties such as alteration in critical micellar concentration (CMC), contact angle, biocompatibility and biodegradability, adhesive properties, and emulsification efficiency can be altered. Therefore, derivatives of RLs and sLs based star shaped biodegradable polymers will be prepared using ε-caprolactone (CL) and DL-lactic acid (LA) monomers through ring opening polymerization (ROP) and used as templates to synthesis biocompatible metal/metal oxide CuO, ZnO and AgNPs polymer nanocomposites. Finally, antiadhesive, antimicrobial and biofilm disrupting activity against a variety of food pathogenic microbes will be evaluated in view of cost effective, biodegradable and non-toxic food preservative and packaging applications.