High pressure treated Bacillus subtilis spores - Structural analysis by means of synchrotron and laboratory based soft X-ray microscopy

Isostatic high pressure processing (HPP) is often regarded as the major recent technological innovation in food preservation. However, this technology is only applied in large scale for pasteurization and not for sterilization, which is largely due to the unknown inactivation mechanisms of highly resistant bacterial endospores. The structural analysis of high pressure treated endospores by X-ray microscopy could be used to study the progress of spore germination and inactivation under pressure and may add to the information already gathered in previous studies such as (Reineke et al., 2013) to establish the high pressure thermal sterilization at industrial scale. This technology in combination with different extrinsic factors like chemical or thermal preservation may open up new possibilities for a multi-target spore inactivation strategy for food sterilization.