IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/aesjfr/405099.html

Evaluation of antimicrobial activities of commercial herb and spice extracts against selected food-borne bacteria

Author

Listed:
  • Witkowska, Anna
  • Hickey, Dara
  • Alonso-Gomez, Mercedes
  • Wilkinson, Martin

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the antimicrobial properties of extracts of thirty commercial herbs and spices commonly used in the production of ready meals. Various extracts of spices were evaluated for their antimicrobial activities against Escherichia coli, Listeria innocua, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas fluorescens using a microdilution broth method. Ethanol and hexane extracts of oregano, clove, sage, rosemary and celery showed relatively strong antimicrobial activities against all bacteria tested. In contrast, water extracts displayed little or no antimicrobial activity. Flow cytometry revealed that cell membrane structures were damaged by spice and herb active extracts, while analysis of intra- and extracellular ATP contents of bacteria indicated that an increase in extracellular ATP was partially due to intracellular leakage. Extract combinations assessed using the checkerboard method did not display synergistic effects, however, some additive effects were observed when oregano was combined with sage or rosemary against L. innocua or S. aureus. This study has demonstrated that some commercial spice extracts have antimicrobial activity against food-borne bacterial species and may be considered as potential antibacterial agents for addition to ready meals.

Suggested Citation

  • Witkowska, Anna & Hickey, Dara & Alonso-Gomez, Mercedes & Wilkinson, Martin, 2013. "Evaluation of antimicrobial activities of commercial herb and spice extracts against selected food-borne bacteria," Journal of Food Research, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 2(4).
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:aesjfr:405099
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/405099/files/26027-95816-1-PB.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aesjfr:405099. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.ccsenet.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.