Interdisciplinary engineering approaches to study how pathogenic bacteria interact with fresh produce

There are many unanswered questions about how bacteria attach and proliferate in fresh produce and as many questions in how to remove them without lowering quality. Presenting techniques from several fields of the sciences and engineering, not only food engineering, this review is meant to increase the fundamental understanding of how bacteria interact with fresh produce through an interdisciplinary approach. Experiment techniques and computational simulations are both reviewed here. They can be used to better understand such complex phenomena, but not limited to, the limitation of different chemical sterilization treatments, the improvement of chemical sterilization by ultrasound, the way bacteria infiltrate openings due to a negative temperature gradient, and the predator–prey relationship between natural microflora and foreign pathogens. By increasing the quantitative results in current research, the underlying mechanisms by which bacteria interact with fresh produce can be elucidated improving food safety.

► Microfluidics generate an environment at a length scale comparable to bacteria.
► Multiscale modeling can create mechanistic models of bacteria growth and death.
► Segregated and structured models are the most complex but offer the greatest insight.