YoungerUSA Embarks on New Food Science Journey

Last month, YoungerUSA's president, Yue (Jeff) Xu, was invited to visit the milk factory belonging to Sanyuan Beijing, a prominent dairy company in China. During this meeting, YoungerUSA shared ideas for how our technology, NMT, could help improve their food safety and quality.

Every year nearly 420,000 people worldwide die from food-related diseases (WHO). Food companies work hard to screen and test the products they sell, and some companies like Sanyuan Beijing are looking for new ideas to improve food safety and quality testing. This is why we met with them; YoungerUSA's NMT Physiolyzer®️ is uniquely suited for tackling innovative new research questions. After the meeting, YoungerUSA believes we can make great contributions to their food safety and nutrition research! We proposed a few ideas to them about how we could both improve on their current methods and introduce new research strategies which we will discuss below. 

NMT Equipment Advantages

Firstly, we impressed the milk company with the sensitivity of our NMT systems.To test for bacteria in milk, our NMT Physiolyzer®️ can detect respiration using H⁺ and O₂ fluxes with sensitivity in femtomoles (10^-15 moles). Compared to the equipment they were already using, this was an exciting prospect for the company. 

This test is also much faster than their current practices: many traditional culture methods for bacteria take 5-10 days, whereas our NMT Physiolyzer®️ can detect bacteria within an hour. This could result in higher productivity for the company.

Simplifying Safety Testing

Another practice that the milk factory currently utilizes is human testing for milk safety. At three points during the milks' processing, they have employees consume the milk. This is a standard practice in the industry and the best current method to really be sure their milk is safe. 

But what if we could offer them another way? Rather than having employees drink the milk, they could achieve the same safety test by measuring live cell and tissue samples instead. Measuring these smaller samples with NMT would provide a faster test, as the body can often take some time to show adverse reactions. If bacteria are present, our NMT Physiolyzer®️ could detect their presence in the small samples much more quickly.

Testing Live Samples

This idea of using live cells or tissue to test dairy would not only be useful for food safety, but for many more quality testing applications. By measuring the reaction of live intestinal samples to milk as if a real person drank it, you can truly assess the quality of the product. Since NMT causes no damage to samples, it is a perfect tool for measuring the physiological reactions of live samples in this manner. Our last three discussion points will be our ideas for quality assessment and testing areas that could most definitely help improve Sanyuan Beijing's dairy products. 

 Calcium Absorbance

What if one milk company claimed to have a higher calcium content than another? That's easy to measure but in reality, calcium content is not nearly as important as calcium absorbance. Based on the other ingredients in the milk and the ratio of these contents, is that calcium actually being absorbed? Using a model of live samples, our technology could PROVE if one milk allows more calcium to be absorbed than another. This is a really unique feature of NMT, because we are not just measuring the concentration of calcium here, but the influx; it can tell if calcium is going into the cells, and also how much and how fast.

To add onto this calcium testing, we also mentioned that our technology is capable of measuring bone samples. (Ref. 1) Sanyuan Beijing could try measuring calcium flux in bone samples and prove that their brand of milk can contribute to strong bones. 

 Breast Milk Comparison

Human breast milk is considered the best food for infants but not all mothers are able to breastfeed. Sanyuan Beijing and other dairy companies have expressed interest in trying to develop baby formula that imitates mother's milk more closely in order to improve infant nutrition. Again, our technology could help them test the success of such a formula by comparing the physiological responses of some cultured cells or tissue samples when introduced to their formula compared to real breastmilk. 

Yogurt Probiotics

Yogurt has become a very popular product in the dairy industry, especially with the rise of public interest in probiotics and gut health associated with it. Sanyuan Beijing has worked hard on an excellent yogurt recipe, with the goal to make it very healthy for human digestion. We proposed a few different ways for them to test their yogurt recipes:

- These recipes could easily be tested the same way we proposed before, by introducing different yogurt to human gut epithelial cells or tissue and assessing their physiological response.

- The NMT Physiolyzer®️ could also help them by directly measuring the yogurts' probiotics, also known as the healthy bacteria that contribute to improved gut health. For example, maybe one yogurt is very healthy for the gut and you want to figure out why. If you use the NMT Physiolyzer®️ to measure the flux profiles of the bacteria in that healthy yogurt, you can use that flux profile to help compare and identify the best bacteria and improve yogurt recipes even further

The improvement to gut health, bone health, and many more benefits of dairy products could be proven with our NMT systems. Now that we have started you off with a few ideas for how our technology can aid the world of food science, we encourage you to try these ideas! With our systems, you could assess bacterial respiration with O₂ and H⁺ flux measurement more quickly than traditional methods; if you want to measure minerals, you can add on Ca²⁺ and K⁺! Our NMT Physiolyzer®️ can measure dynamic fluxes of a customized index of ions and molecules with high sensitivity, and it is currently the world's most advanced system using the non-invasive micro-test technique. Check out the NMT Physiolyzer®️ for full details and happy experimenting!

Reference

1. Marenzana M et al. Bone as an ion exchange organ: evidence for instantaneous cell-dependent calcium efflux from bone not due to resorption. Bone. 2005, 37(4):545-554.