Introduction: Ensuring safe and quality food with the least possible impact on the environment and health is an increasing challenge in our society. Foods are packed in packaging to extend their shelf lifemand and to maintain organoleptic properties. Packaging made of non-degradable materials is mostly used. Purpose: The purpose of the master's thesis is to investigate whether chitosan coating inhibits the growth of mold Penicillium expansum and consequently reduces the content of patulin toxin produced by it. The aim is to investigate which organic acid in the chitosan coating affects the inhibition of mold growth mostly. Methods: To test the hypotheses, experiments were performed in three parts. The first part was devoted to check whether the chitosan coating reality inhibits the growth of the mold. In the second experiment, the color of apples and consequently its impact on mold growth after application of the chitosan coating was studied. Whereas in the last experiment, the organic acids, which inhibited the most growth of mold was defined. Two acids, acetic and citric, were used for this part of the experiment. In the last experiment, we also determined the concentration of the toxin patulin, which is produced by the mold Penicillium expansum. Results: In the first experiment, we obtained promising results suggesting that chitosan coating inhibited mold growth. In the second experiment, we found that apple color did not affect the inhibition of mold growth. In the third experiment, we came to the conclusion that acetic acid has the greatest antimicrobial effect in chitosan coating. As the mold diameter increased in the samples of 1 % chitosan solution with acetic and citric acid, the concentration of patulin increased. Discussion and conclusion: Acetic acid is used in the food industry, and with our findings we could conclude that chitosan coating in acetic acid has good potential for further development. As part of the master's thesis, we were limited by finances, so we could only conduct the research up to this point (only in a single experiment, without additional repetitions). For more repetable and accurate results the experiment should be done in more replicates.
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