ABSTRACT
The need to preserve food quality for various periods of time has attracted great attention worldwide for finding the best possible solutions to preserving foods of different nature in a way that have no compromise on the expected quality and so the characters of the food are preserved too. Growing consumer awareness and increased regulatory guidelines for natural and environment-friendly solutions to food packaging has led to an unprecedented rise in the search for safe, efficient, but at the same time natural and environment-friendly solutions for food packaging. The use of bacteriocins, natural antimicrobial peptides of bacterial origin, is one of the most popular antimicrobials today for use in food preservation. Nisin, the commercially available bacteriocin, has a great future in the food industry as it preserves the food quality, controlling the food spoilage by microbes, and is thus being explored extensively for food packaging formulations singly, as well as in combination with other antimicrobials available for use in the food industry. A lot has to be done, both in laboratory and pilot studies, as well as commercial scale for exploration of the full potential of nisin. This is in addition toother bacteriocins as food preservatives, as the use of nisin in different foods and in different food packaging formulations is still limited. Also, the use of other bacteriocins needs to be further studied for potential safety and possible scale up of use.
