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Revision as of 08:03, 12 September 2017
LATARCOLI: A KNIGHT ON GUARD AGAINST FOOD PATHOGENS
INTRODUCTION
In today’s world, despite all the available, sophisticated food processing techniques, right from the farm to the plate, food contamination and spoilage is a major issue. There are thousands of people in the world who die because of hunger every day, which is a shame because around 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year out of which 50-60% is spoilage due to microbial contamination.
SCOPE IN INDIA
In a country where 20 crore people go to sleep hungry any given night, the actual worth of the food wasted in India annually is estimated at a whopping Rs. 58,000 crore. Of the total food production that not only involves resources like lot of water, electricity, agricultural tools but also manpower and land, 40% of the total food produced is wasted. Even though India comes second in the total agricultural output worldwide, it still ranks 63rd among 88 countries in Global Hunger Index. With the amount of food wasted and considering the lack of priority that is given towards proper food storage and preservation, food is more often than not subjected to microbial contamination, thus unsurprisingly leading to eventual spoilage.
SOLUTION
This year, we thus plan to tackle this problem to an extent. Though we cannot completely solve the wastage of food, we can surely provide a solution to bring a halt to wastage pf food by microbes. How? Well, the basic idea is to make Escherichia coli produce an antimicrobial peptide (AMP) called Latarcin, otherwise known as M-Zodatoxin. Latarcin is a short, basic, linear peptide isolated from a spider called Lachesana tarabaevi. It acts on bacteria via the carpet mechanism and effectively kills them. Thus we plan to create a wrapper for food, which will have Latarcin producing Escherichia coli incorporated within that will help in acting against microbial infection. It is an efficient and simple solution that we are sure will help in bringing down the total amount of food wasted due to spoilage considerably.
