Electroporation is a method of treatment of plant tissue that due to its nonthermal nature enables preservation of the natural quality, colour and vitamin composition of food products. The range of processes where electroporation was shown to preserve quality, increase extract yield or optimize energy input into the process is overwhelming, though not exhausted; e.g. extraction of valuable compounds and juices, dehydration, cryopreservation, etc. Electroporation is--due to its antimicrobial action--a subject of research as one stage of the pasteurization or sterilization process, as well as a method of plant metabolism stimulation. This paper provides an overview of electroporation as applied to plant materials and electroporation applications in food processing, a quick summary of the basic technical aspects on the topic, and a brief discussion on perspectives for future research and development in the field. The paper is a review in the very broadest sense of the word, written with the purpose of orienting the interested newcomer to the field of electroporation applications in food technology towards the pertinent, highly relevant and more in-depth literature from the respective subdomains of electroporation research.

In many electroporation applications mass transport in biological tissue is of primary concern. This paper presents a theoretical advancement in the field and gives some examples of model use in electroporation applications. The study focuses on post-treatment solute diffusion. We use a dual-porosity approach to describe solute diffusion in electroporated biological tissue. The cellular membrane presents a hindrance to solute transport into the extracellular space and is modeled as electroporation-dependent porosity, assigned to the intracellular space (the finite rate of mass transfer within an individual cell is not accounted for, for reasons that we elaborate on). The second porosity is that of the extracellular space, through which solute vacates a block of tissue. The model can be used to study extraction out of or introduction of solutes into tissue, and we give three examples of application, a full account of model construction, validation with experiments, and a parametrical analysis. To facilitate easy implementation and experimentation by the reader, the complete derivation of the analytical solution for a simplified example is presented. Validation is done by comparing model results to experimentally-obtained data; we modeled kinetics of sucrose extraction by diffusion from sugar beet tissue in laboratory-scale experiments. The parametrical analysis demonstrates the importance of selected physicochemical and geometrical properties of the system, illustrating possible outcomes of applying the model to different electroporation applications. The proposed model is a new platform that supports rapid extension by state-of-the-art models of electroporation phenomena, developed as latest achievements in the field of electroporation.

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