Ready-to-eat salads are very perishable with quality losses within 6-7 days, and the extension of their shelf life is still a challenge. In this work, an atmospheric pressure plasma jet (APPJ) was applied for the surface decontamination of fresh-cut lettuce baby leaves. The APPJ antimicrobial efficiency on the natural microbiota and its impact on some physicochemical attributes of lettuce were evaluated as a function of the treatment duration (0-30 s). Then, the influence of plasma treatment on the salad shelf life was studied, following the growth of aerobic mesophilic bacteria in both untreated and plasma-treated samples during 9 days of storage at 4 degrees C, together with the plasma-induced changes in physicochemical parameters of lettuce leaves. The APPJ induced a fast (15 s) microbial decontamination (1.3 log(10) CFU\/g) of the salad surface. Exposure time and salad-plasma plume distance were the parameters that substantially affected the microbial inactivation. APPJ treatment retarded bacterial growth during the refrigerated storage, as plasma-treated samples were noticeably less contaminated than the non-treated ones in the first 3-4 days. No significant effect were observed on electrolyte leakage, pH, and dry matter content in both the set up phase and the shelf life study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Silvetti T.; Pedroni M.; Brasca M.; Vassallo E.; Cocetta G.; Ferrante A.; De Noni I.; Piazza L.; Morandi S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[574],"product_tag":[1620,1621,1622,1623,1624],"class_list":["post-6942","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","product_cat-journal-articles","product_tag-antimicrobial","product_tag-atmospheric-pressure-cold-plasma","product_tag-minimally-processed","product_tag-ready-to-eat-salad","product_tag-shelf-life","prodpage-style2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/6942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=6942"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.istp.cnr.it\/it\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=6942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}