BACTERIAL MICROBIOTA AND CHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF TURKISH TARHANA

Tarhana is one of the traditional Turkish fermented food and it is served as a soup. In this study, bacterial microbiota and chemical properties (acidity, salt, and moisture content) of tarhana samples (n=96) were examined. The metagenomic analysis revealed that Firmicutes were the dominant phylum and Bacillaceae, Enterococcaceae, Paenibacillaceae, Enterobacteriaceae, and Clostridiaceae were the dominant bacterial families. In the samples, Bacillus, Enterococcus, and Paenibacillus were mostly identified at the genus level. Alpha diversity and evenness showed that sample 30 had the highest diversity collected from Izmir. Principal Coordinate Analysis was used to identify relationships of samples at different taxonomic levels and it was found that most of the samples were closely related at the phylum level. Chemical analysis indicated that the acidity of tarhana samples varied between 5.00% and 42.5%, moisture contents were 4.39- 18.66% and salt values were from 0.32% to 6.64%. The results of this study extensively demonstrated the chemical properties and the dominant bacterial communities present in tarhana samples collected from different parts of Turkiye

Targeted mesoporous silica nanoparticles for improved inhibition of disinfectant resistant Listeria monocytogenes and lower environmental pollution

Benzalkonium chloride (BAC) is a common ingredient of disinfectants used for industrial, medical, food safety and domestic applications. It is a common pollutant detected in surface and wastewaters to induce adverse effects on Human health as well as aquatic and terrestrial life forms. Since disinfectant use is essential in combatting against microorganisms, the best approach to reduce ecotoxicity level is to restrict BAC use. We report here that encapsulation of BAC in mesoporous silica nanoparticles can provide an efficient strategy for inhibition of mi-crobial activity with lower than usual concentrations of disinfectants. As a proof-of-concept, Listeria mono-cytogenes was evaluated for minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of nanomaterial encapsulated BAC. Aptamer molecular gate structures provided a specific targeting of the disinfectant to Listeria cells, leading to high BAC concentrations around bacterial cells, but significantly reduced amounts in total. This strategy allowed to inhibition of BAC resistant Listeria strains with 8 times less the usual disinfectant dose. BAC encapsulated and aptamer functionalized silica nanoparticles (AptBACNP) effectively killed only target bacteria L. monocytogenes, but not the non-target cells, Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli. AptBACNP was not cytotoxic to Human cells as determined by in vitro viability assays