SILENCING bacterial chit-chat may help keep vegetables fresh. Food-spoiling bugs can munch away on vegetables without causing any damage as long as there aren鈥檛 too many of them. But once their population grows to about 100 million bacteria per gram, they release enzymes to get extra nutrients and it is these enzymes that make the vegetables go off.
Lone Gram at the Danish Institute for Fisheries discovered that Pectobacteria sense each other by releasing a hormone-like molecule into the air. She is now trying to find a way of jamming that signal. 鈥淚f we can cheat them so they don鈥檛 realise the other bacteria are there, they will still happily grow and eat, but the food won鈥檛 rot,鈥� she told a meeting of the UK Society for General Microbiology at Keele this week.
