Project description:Baby leaves of lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) are widely used to produce ready-to-eat salads all around the year. For this purpose, lettuce plants are cultivated under plastic tunnels and harvested at a very early growth stage, between 30-45 days after sowing depending on the season, cultivar and site of cultivation. Usually, the plastic film covering the cultivation tunnels transmits only a very small amount of the solar UVB radiation and partially attenuates UVA radiation. We used UV treatment post-harvest of fresh-cut lettuce baby leaves to compare the efficiency of two UV emission wavebands centred at 306 and 366 nm (achieved by employing narrow-band UV LEDs sources) to identify putative transcriptomic signatures. The analyses have been carried out supported by and in the frame of Project @CNR 2021, Title "EnhAncement of Natural anTIviral Compounds in ready- to-eat Vegetables", Acronym: ANTI-CoV to Dr. G. Agati. IDP-NAHEP, ICAR, Govt of India to A.R.B.
Project description:Persistence of Listeria monocytogenes in retail deli environments is a serious food safety issue, potentially leading to cross-contamination of ready-to-eat foods such as deli meats, salads, and cheeses. We previously discovered strong evidence of L. monocytogenes persistence in delis across multiple states. We hypothesized that this was correlated with isolates’ innate characteristics, such as biofilm-forming capacity or gene differences.We further chose four isolates for RNA-sequencing analysis and compared their global biofilm transcriptome to their global planktonic transcriptome. Analysis of biofilm vs planktonic gene expression did not show the expected differences in gene expression patterns. Overall, L. monocytogenes persistence in the deli environment is likely a matter of poor sanitation and/or facility design, rather than isolates’ biofilm-forming capacity, sanitizer tolerance, or genomic content
Project description:There are 18 ready-to-eat food samples (8 ready-to-eat meat, 7 ready-to-eat vegetables and 3 ready-to-eat fruit) and 6 human faecal samples. The samples were sequenced on the Illumina, NovaSeq PE150.