8/9/2019 Researcher: Food labels with microbial data could help manage physical, and possibly mental, health

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Researcher: Food labels with microbial data could help

manage physical, and possibly mental, health

By:Kathleen Phillips, 979-845-2872

Contact: Dr. Suresh Pillai, 979-845-2994, S-pillai@tamu.edu

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COLLEGE STATION Just as food labels now tell the content of fat, fiber, vitamins andminerals, food scientists believe the information one day will include all bacteria andfungi in the product.

Like a nutritional profile, we are creating a microbial profile, said Dr. Suresh Pillai,

Texas AgriLife Research food microbiologist and director of the National Center for

Electron Beam Research at Texas A&M University. We are very interested in howmicroorganisms behave in food, and we treat all microorganisms as opportunistic

pathogens.

Knowing what microbes are in foods could become increasingly important as researchers

continue to discover ways the tiny organisms impact human mental and physical health,he noted.

Every part of the human body is colonized by very unique microorganisms that are

providing functionality to humans. Its not that they are contaminants. If you removed

them, then there would be physiological effects in humans," said Pillai, who haspresented the findings with graduate student Katherine McElhany at the American

Society for Microbiology meeting.

He pointed out that microbes predate humans by millions of years. If the history of the

Earth was compared to months in a year, he said, microbes would have developed byFeb. 28 and humans would have come along on Dec. 31.

We are never going to rule the microbes, Pillai said.

Further, he said, for every one human cell in the world, there are 10 microbes.

With that ratio of bacteria to people, Pillai and colleagues have been studying how theseorganisms behave in the human body.

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8/9/2019 Researcher: Food labels with microbial data could help manage physical, and possibly mental, health

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One thing that is known, he said, is that bacterial cells communicate via autoinducer or

"signalling" molecules that communicate a variety of messages between cells.

Were also using a lot of our effort looking at how these organisms communicate withone another in the food, Pillai said. For example, if you have two or three cells of

Salmonella in orange juice, will all the protein expression in these bacterial cells besimilar if the same Salmonella cells were present in apple juice or in ground beef or

chicken meat? We really do not have a clear understanding about that.

One signaling molecule in particular the AI-2 molecule has been shown in Pillais lab

to control a pathogen such as Salmonella, causing it to behave differently when the

organism is in different products in ground beef versus poultry meat, for example.

AI-2 is associated with Salmonella, E. coli, Streptococcus, Clostridium and other suchpathogenic bacteria.

Different fatty acids in the products influence AI-2 activity, Pillai pointed out, as did themethod in which the food was processed or prepared.

The poultry meat and ground beef have certain fatty acids in them that actually would

moderate the level of AI-2, he said. We also found out that the virulence genes responddifferently based on how meats are processed if its cooked, uncooked, etc.

In other words, the food material the organisms reside in will have a differential effect

whether the microbe survives and how virulent it is, Pillai said.

He said the study implies that the virulence of a potentially pathogenic microorganism

can be modified in different foods and substrates.

Infective doses could vary for the same organism in different foods and substrates and

this has important ramifications for microbial risk assessment, Pillai added.

Not only is this information important for daily food consumption, he said, butpotentially could have impact over the lifelong development of people from infancy.

A question we have is what is the net result of these interactions in terms of how the

gastrointestinal tract develops in infants, what happens in adults, how does this impact

chronic ailments like obesity? he said. At what age are we sentenced to a particular

microbiome, or environment of microbes in our systems?

Information the researchers have gleaned from the study may ultimately help

fingerprint foods for microbial data, which could be relayed to people for choosing

foods that are best for their conditions.

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