Abstract Food safety is enhanced by the use of antimicrobials that prevent or delay spoilage and ensure widespread use of pesticides with drawbacks such as increased costs, concerns about food residues and toxins. This study evaluated the production capacity of antimicrobial proteins by two Enterococcus strains (Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus hirae). After the cultures of Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus hirae in BHI agar medium, the antimicrobial compounds of the strains were purified by dialyzing, and the amount of produced protein was determined by a Lowry test. Further, SDS-PAGE electrophoresis was used to estimate molecular weight. The well-diffusion method was used to test the antimicrobial properties of the compounds studied. Before and after dialysis, factors related to protein activity were determined. Additionally, compounds were evaluated for their minimum inhibitory concentrations. The results show that the most antimicrobial effect of antimicrobial species on the Bacillus cereus and more antimicrobial effects on the hirae species on Staphylococcus aureus.

Abstract In this research, the quality properties of persimmon were predicted using artificial intellect techniques. The persimmon samples were transferred to a computer vision lab, room temperature of 24 °C and 22% RH. The samples were divided into three groups for temperature treatment. They were kept at three temperature levels of 5 °C, 15 °C, and 24°C (control group) for 72 hours. The sample was then placed at room temperature and was imaged every second day for a 14 day period. After imaging, each sample underwent destructive tests to determine their quality attributes, including sugar content, firmness, and pH. The results indicate that the neural network's predicted values of acidity, firmness, and sugar of persimmon were not statistically significant differences from their actual values. In predicting the acidity of persimmon, the sugar RMSE is more than the two factors of firmness and acidity. For this reason, the accuracy of firmness and acidity is higher than sugar. MAPE is 10.11, 20.81, and 6.03 for acidity, firmness, and sugar, respectively. The model for sugar indicates a high difference between the actual values and the predicted values.

Abstract Infrared waves have found a special place in the food industry as one of the new sources of heat production. Infrared heating technology transfers large amounts of energy to the environment or material being processed in a short time. Also improves the quality of the product and makes the product produced by this method have a higher quality than the product produced by traditional methods. Applying modern methods of heating food achieves high-quality processed products and also reduces energy consumption. One of these methods is infrared heating, which can replace many other processes in the industry as an effective method in food processing. Infrared heating has many advantages over conventional heating in similar conditions, including reduced heating time, uniform heating, high heat transfer coefficient, reduced quality loss, significant energy savings, and environmental friendliness. This paper investigates heating using infrared radiation at temperatures of 55, 65, 75, and 85 °C, and its effect on pumpkin drying. The studied parameters include moisture ratio, drying rate, effective diffusion coefficient, and activation energy. According to the results, with increasing temperature from 55 to 85 °C, the drying time decreases by about 60%, and the effective diffusion coefficient has increased by 140%.