Students in the Alabama A&M University (AAMU) Food Engineering Lab are working on what could be a breakthrough in food preservation and packaging technology.

The students are using hemp grown at AAMU’s Winfred Thomas Agricultural Research Station to create an antimicrobial nanofilm that, unlike conventional plastic wrap, can kill or prevent the growth of dangerous bacteria found in food, such as Salmonella and Listeria.

“We call it antimicrobial packaging, which is an active packaging,” said Lamin M. Kassama, AAMU professor of Food Engineering/Processing and the principal investigator on the project.

“We infuse these materials with an antimicrobial agent to make it an active packaging, so that once you place it on the packaging there are active compounds that interact with the package material that releases antimicrobials to minimize the proliferation of microbes.”

Aaron Dudley (left) and Lamin Kassama hold a sample of the film packaging material. (Alabama A&M University)

Students in Kassama’s lab fabricate the active film using a Fluidnatek LE-50, a professional-grade electrospinning and electrospraying system, from Nanoscience Instruments Inc.

“We grind the hemp into a powder and disperse it in ethanol in order to extract the phytochemicals,” said Ph.D. candidate Aaron Dudley. “Every phytochemical that’s ethanol soluble will basically leave the plant material and go into the solution of the ethanol. We take that and mix it with a polymer that helps us to electrospin.”

Dudley says the LE-50 places the polymer solution under higher electrical voltage, ejecting a polymer they can turn into an antimicrobial film wrap.

“It’s basically taking a material and encapsulating it at the nano scale, which is a billionth of a size, so 500 times smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair – so it’s really, really thin,” Dudley said. “What that allows for us to do is drug delivery. It enables us to deliver a therapeutic agent with a bioactive result for antimicrobial effectiveness.”

The Food Engineering Lab has been testing the film on fresh chicken.

“We’ve wrapped fresh chicken breast meat with this material, and we found that it did inhibit the growth both Salmonella enterica and Listeria monocytogenes at refrigerated temperatures,” Dudley said.

Kassama said the active film not only wards off dangerous microbes to make food safer: It may also extend food shelf life, and it is biodegradable.

Lamin Kassama, second from right, with student researchers in the Food Engineering Lab at Alabama A&M University. (contributed)

“This compound is extracted from hemp, from a natural source. The industry is trending towards biodegradable packaging. Plastic materials are contaminants and pollutants. This is made of a material which, if you leave in the soil for maybe a month or so, it will just degrade by itself.”

Kassama said the active packaging film is still a laboratory model, but with continued research, could move to pilot- and then commercial-scale.

“This is an emerging technology, so a lot of the larger scale is still being developed,” Dudley said. “There are larger pieces of equipment that electrospin larger batch sizes, but it hasn’t reached commercial bandwidth yet. Probably in the next three to five years, you may be seeing and hearing about electrospun packaging, clothing material, etc.”

This story originally appeared on the Alabama A&M University website.