Natural Antimicrobial Agents: Recent Development and Future Direction

In the recent years, there has been increasing interest to replace synthetic preservatives with natural preservatives as consumers have become more concerned about the safety of food they eat, and on the other part consumer also demand food with long shelf lives. These requirements have stimulated development of natural presevatives to replace chemical preservatives for production of safe food with long shelf lives. The most progressing development is natural preservatives of plants and microbial origin. Among plants origin, spices and herbs have been extentsively studied as source of natural antimicrobial agents. Spices and herbs have been added to food since ancient times as part of daily diet all over the world. Beside as flavouring agents, many of them, including those used in Indonesian cooking, have been reported to have antimicrobial properties against different types of microbes, including foodborne pathogens. The antimicrobial properties of spices and herbs has been attributed to the presence of alkaloids, phenols, glycosides, steroids, essential oils, coumarins and tannins. Microbial origin of food preservatives have also attracted attention as potential substitutes for synthetic antimicrobial compounds. Bacteriosin is the most common antimicrobial agent produced by microorganism. Bacteriocins are proteinaceous compounds of bacterial origin that are lethal to bacteria other than the producing strain. Nisin is the only food preservatives of microbial origin that has been produced and applied commercially. Many other bacteriocins with a wide spectrum activity have been developed from different strain of microorganism especially lactic acid bacteria. A part from progress of development of natural antimicrobial agents, their use at a commercial level is still limited due to several factors such as impact on sensory attributes and availability at industrial scale. The future research should be directed on the effects of natural antimicrobial on food sensory characteristics and scalling up of production to support the use of natural antimicrobial agents as feasible alternatives to synthetic ones.