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Seed sanitation: Secret of safe sprout production and risk management associated with manufacturing of sprouted products.
H. FENG (1). (1) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, U.S.A.

To ensure the microbial safety of sprouts, clean seeds without human pathogens are a prerequisite, but currently no single treatment can provide adequate decontamination without compromising the seed or sprout quality.  We confirmed that current 20,000 ppm Ca(OCl)2 wash, as recommended by the FDA, was only effective for certain seed types and seed surface conditions. We found that bacterial cells that have survived a sanitation wash can grow to a high population during sprouting even though only a small number of cells were found on the seeds prior to the sprouting.  Our data showed that different seeds had different surface roughness, contributing to discrepancies in the ability of the sanitizers to eliminate human pathogens on the seeds. Therefore, the effectiveness of one sanitizer on one seed type should not be translated to all seed varieties. The effectiveness of the new MA+TDS solution for inactivation of pathogens on more seed types will be examined.  Moreover, our study demonstrated that microbial inactivation results obtained in a laboratory cannot be directly extrapolated and applied to a large-scale operation. A possible solution is to use the hurdle concept, combining several chemical and physical sanitation agents in a seed sanitation process to eliminate and prevent the growth of pathogenic organisms. 

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