Efficacy of leaves (drumstick, mint and curry leaves) powder as natural preservatives in restructured chicken block.

The use of natural preservatives to increase the shelf-life of meat products is promising as they possess antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. Earlier, a highly acceptable restructured chicken slice without the addition of extra fat was developed in the same laboratory which was acceptable up to 10th day of storage under refrigeration and spoilage was mainly due to oxidation. Hence, the present study was planned to determine the efficacy of certain plant leaves' (drumstick, mint and curry leaves) powder at 1 % level as natural preservatives to enhance the shelf life of restructured chicken slices under refrigerated storage. The quality attributes of the products containing different natural preservativs were compared with the control and reference products. The control product contained no preservative and the reference product contained BHT (200 ppm) only. Incorporation of the leaf powders at 1 % level did not show any significant differences for both cooking yield (99.5-99.6 %) and proximate composition (moisture 72.2-72.3 %, protein 19.2-19.4 %, fat 4.2-4.3 % and total ash 2.3-2.4 %) of the restructured chicken slices compared to both control and reference products during storage. All products containing leaf powders showed significantly (P < 0.01) lower microbial counts (2.9-3.7 log10 CFU/g) compared to both control and BHT added products. Yeast and mould were not detected in any of the products throughout the storage period. Sensory evaluation scores showed that the restructured chicken slices incorporated with the leaf powders were as acceptable as the reference product and rated good to very good for appearance, flavor, juiciness and overall acceptability. Restructured chicken slices with the leaf powders could be safely stored without much loss in quality up to 20 days under refrigeration.

"Safe" Coulomb excitation of 30Mg.

We report on the first radioactive beam experiment performed at the recently commissioned REX-ISOLDE facility at CERN in conjunction with the highly efficient gamma spectrometer MINIBALL. Using 30Mg ions accelerated to an energy of 2.25 MeV/u together with a thin (nat)Ni target, Coulomb excitation of the first excited 2+ states of the projectile and target nuclei well below the Coulomb barrier was observed. From the measured relative deexcitation gamma-ray yields the B(E2;0(+)gs-->2(+)1) value of 30Mg was determined to be 241(31)e2 fm4. Our result is lower than values obtained at projectile fragmentation facilities using the intermediate-energy Coulomb excitation method, and confirms the theoretical conjecture that the neutron-rich magnesium isotope 30Mg resides outside the "island of inversion."