SCIENCE BEHIND
Why should mold be monitored?
Mold can grow on almost all foods; especially fresh fruits and vegetables which are more prone to mold growth than other food due to their high water content. Mold can grow during the food production process including growing, harvesting, storage, or processing.
The solution is to detect the mold before it grows and then separates boxes of potentially contaminated food from healthy fresh produce.
The MIST Sticker
The best way to avoid mold in food is to find mold before it infects everything. A sticker with an optimized culture made of dextrose agar (SDA) and potato dextrose agar (PDA) with acidic pH to promote mold growth. Such a culture will be deadly to bacteria, preventing contamination, but mold will thrive – making this culture an indicator of mold concentration levels in the air around.
Why is pH important in mold monitoring?
As mold starts to penetrate the fruit peel the growth leads to colonization and the pH will start to increase as is depicted in the pictures.
*A Mold Colony Forming Unit (CFU, cfu, Cfu) is a unit used in microbiology to estimate the number of viable bacteria or fungal cells in a sample.
The spores attach to fruits and the fungi can invade and attach to complex carbohydrates, and even the topology of the plant can be a stimulus as seen in this picture. The idea is to replicate that process but in something that is not a fruit. Regularly, molds can grow and change pH by making them alkaline from pH 4.0 to 5.6 or even 7 in the case of infected fruit.
HYDROGEL
Our proprietary hydrogel with pH indicator is an effective solution to detect mold in an early stage. Basically, the hydrogel made of complex carbohydrates will imitate the fruit surface and together with the optimized culture will detonate the growth of the mold. The mold caught by the gel will then grow and produce blue spots. For this indicator, yeast produces green/blue, opaque large colonies. Mold colonies are green and filamentous
Mold Detection Basic pH change color​
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The mold/yeast spores will attach to the pad, which is made of hydrogels that will stimulate growth.
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The growth of mold in the pad will be trigger by enriched medium according to AOAC method molecules and change its color as the pH increases; the indicator will change, different optimized pH indicators can be used.