A 10-week project funded by CRA Corn Refiners Association:
The hypothesis tested in this project is that pilot-scale adaptations of industrially relevant unit operations of steeping, peroxide treatment, and drying, reduce counts of the indicator organism Enterococcus faecium in inoculated challenge studies. The specific objectives to test this hypothesis are:
Conduct an E. faecium inoculated challenge study for production of dry powders at pilot-scale using a corn wet milling unit operations varying steeping, peroxide, and drying parameters.
Count the surviving population of E. faecium at each unit operation
The overall objective of this project is to build a simulation for powdered product testing. This work would provide not just comprehensive guidance on generic powder plans, but a tool for industry to assess their specific concerns when working to improve their food safety testing plans. The objectives of the project are:
Leverage an existing bulk product simulation model developed by our lab to model powder sampling for microbiological safety and validate against academic data..
Benchmark the ability of existing industry sampling plans to detect food safety and quality hazards at relevant prevalence and levels.
Develop a web-based graphical user interface so that producers could assess sampling plans for their own processes and suppliers could develop science-based requirements to manage specific risks
Build a Field-to-Facility generic supply chain model of produce safety testing.
Adapt the supply chain and collect parameters to represent a variety of commodities with distinct risk profiles and risk-management options.
Optimize testing across the supply chain of each commodity incorporating representative testing programs at primary production, harvesting, receiving, processing, and packing and assessing their impact to manage safety.
A five-year project funded by USDA NIFA Hatch funds which represented a significant portion of my group’s startup funds.
To support the long-term goal of developing a flexible applied food safety laboratory, Hatch funds will be used to support the following initial, discrete projects:
Genomics and Engineering Tools for Persistent Pathogen Identification and Control.
Single-Kernel Sorting to Remove Mycotoxins from Cereals.
Systems Approaches to Valuing Reductions in Foodborne Pathogen Contamination of Foods.
This project will build a simulation model to solve the problem of how to best take many samples of bulk products for food safety testing. That way, industries can use that knowledge to create sampling plans, and sampling devices, for their products that achieve important food safety goals. The general objective of this project is to build a validated and ready-to-use simulation model of bulk product sampling to improving sampling plans. The specific aims are:
Build a bulk product sampling simulation model for food safety testing.
Validate the simulation model against reported bulk product sampling.
Validate corn-aflatoxin simulation against experimental Texas corn sampling.
Build a user interface to parameterize the simulation model by answering a series of web-based questions.
ILSI, and my group, is committed to open, honest science particularly when industry stakeholder come together to aggregate support for important projects such as this. Therefore, you can find a complete pre-registration of this project under the Open Science Framework: Project Public Registration.
