Pink discoloration in cheese is a defect affecting many cheeses throughout the world, leading to significant financial loss for the dairy industry. Despite decades of research, the cause of this defect has remained elusive. The advent of high-throughput, next-generation sequencing has revolutionized the field of food microbiology and, with respect to this study, provided a means of testing a possible microbial basis for this defect. In this study, a combined 16S rRNA, whole-genome sequencing, and quantitative PCR approach was taken. This resulted in the identification of Thermus, a carotenoid-producing thermophile, in defect-associated cheeses and the recreation of the problem in cheeses to which Thermus was added. This finding has the potential to lead to new strategies to eliminate this defect, and our method represents an approach that can be employed to investigate the role of microbes in other food defects of unknown origin.

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Lanthanide oxide nanocrystallites have gained a lot of attention due to their diverse use for potential applications and for this reason it is very important to find a suitable preparation method that would be economically inexpensive and easy to implement. The chapter describes the preparation of gadolinium oxide nanocrystallites (nano Gd 2 O 3 ) through thermal decomposition of a complex formed by Gd(NO 3 ) 3 ·6H 2 O and glycine. Decomposition of the complex occurs at temperatures about (250 ± 10)C. An ultrafine white powder of the gadolinium oxide nanocrystallites was obtained. The resulting nanocrystallites were characterized by X-ray powder diffraction analysis, which revealed the size of the gadolinium oxide nanocrystallites equal to 10 nm. The morphology of the gadolinium oxide nanocrystallites was examined by scanning electron microscopy. The elemental composition of the product was confirmed by EDS analysis.

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