Growth inhibition of foodborne pathogenic bacteria by extractive from peanut leaves

---Lutiee Research background: Peanut has enjoyed the wide popularity as one kind of the main foods for thousands of years. Owning to its high quality of nutrition, people call peanut the longlife-nut in China. In Japan, which is a main import country in the world, more than 20,000 tons of peanut are produced and about 100,000 tons of original peanut or peanut products are imported every year. Since peanut has been widely planted, a large quantity of its by-products, for example, peanut stalks and leaves, are thrown away. Most of them are incinerated like other wastes or just used as the feed or the fertilizer. In China, these by-product have been used as a constitution of traditional Chinese medicine for a long time. As the stalks and leaves of peanuts contain various kinds of biological activating components, researching an efficient way to extract these components and developing into a product is an immediate necessity. Chemical preservatives are currently the most widely used food preservative, but it has a negative influence on human health and ecological environment, so people have already started looking for a more efficient and safer food additives to replace it. As thus, natural food preservative with peanut leaves as raw material becomes a new popular research direction. Research content: This study focuses on Bacteriostatic action of extractive from peanut leaves, and researches the possibility of using this extractive as a type of natural food preservative. Firstly, except for the protein, the peanut leaves also contain a small amount of cellulose, isoflavone, and ash content. It is needed to isolate the protein and extract the effective substance from it. Secondly, investigate the antimicrobial activity of this extractive, and modify it by chemical method to improve its stability. Thirdly, research the toxicology evaluation of the extraction as natural food preservative, and then develop products applied to industrial production. Research objective: The objective of this study is to find an appropriate way to reuse the low-valued peanut leaves, and then develop a new type of natural food preservative by the extractive from peanut leaves. Research materials and methods: Materials: Peanut leaves, ethyl alcohol, glacial acetic acid, glycerin, Casoy Agar, staphylococcus, bacillus subtilis, colibacillus. Methods: The leaves were washed under running tap water and blotted with a paper towel. The extract was obtained by homogenizing equal amounts of entire peanut leaves and isopropanol, followed by shaking the mixture for 15 min and ltering through Whatman paper No. 7. Active charcoal was added to the resultant solution, and allowed to stand for 10 min before ltration. Growth inhibition test was prepared according to filter paper dispersion method. Each experiment was performed in triplicate.