Understanding of the primary gushing mechanism in over-carbonated beverages

The primary gushing is a spontaneous and wild overfoaming of over-carbonated beverages that occurs at the opening of the bottle without any shaking. Amphiphilic proteins present in the raw materials when the weather conditions are favorable for fungal contamination (high humidity and temperature) are responsible for this phenomenon that represents important commercial damages for the companies. These proteins are called hydrophobins and are produced by filamentous fungi. The poster will present the structure of this doctoral research and the first results obtained. The main objective of this research is to understand the mechanism and how can hydrophobins act to provoke this overfoaming. The first step is the production of hydrophobin at lab-scale to have suffisant amount to realize the experimentations.At this moment, the HFBI hydrophobin from Trichoderma reesei MUCL44908 is produced at lab-scale, purified by Reverse Phase-High Performance Liquid Chromatography and detected by Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization Time-of-Flight. The identification is realized by comparison with results published in the literature but the identification of digest peptides and the sequencing have to be purchased to apply the method on unknown hydrophobin present in the gushing products. In the same time, gushing beer and gushing malt are at disposal to develop detection methods to predict the presence of hydrophobins as early as possible in the process. Another objective but not the least is the development of a curative method to avoid the gushing when hydrophobins are present in the raw materials.status: publishe