The escalating global demand for nutritious and sustainable food sources has heightened interest in microbial biotransformation in food, a process in which microorganisms chemically modify food components to enhance their functional properties and nutritional content. This review provides a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in microbial fermentation, focusing on its impact on food quality, nutritional enhancement, and public health. Emphasizing both traditional fermentation practices and modern biotechnological innovations, this review highlights how beneficial microorganisms transform raw food substrates into products with superior nutrient bioavailability and functional benefits. Key developments include the synthesis of bioactive compounds, reduction of anti-nutritional factors, and improvement of sensory attributes, all of which collectively contribute to disease prevention, gut health, and overall well-being. Additionally, this review addresses safety concerns and challenges in microbial fermentation, including microbiological hazards, chemical contaminants, and strategies for their management. It also explores the difficulties in scaling up these processes for industrial applications and discusses future directions for sustainable food production. By consolidating current knowledge and identifying emerging trends, this review provides a comprehensive resource for researchers, industry professionals, and policymakers, offering insights into leveraging microbial biotransformation to create nutritionally enriched and functionally enhanced food products.

Potatoes are a staple food crop consumed worldwide, with their significance extending from household kitchens to large-scale food processing industries. Their market value and quality are often compromised by various internal defects such as pythium, bruising, internal browning, hollow heart, gangrene, blackheart, internal sprouting, and dry rot. This study aimed to classify internal-based defects and investigate the quantification of internal defective areas in potatoes using visible and short-wavelength near-infrared spectroscopy. The acquisition of the spectral data of potato tubers was performed using a spectrometer with a wavelength range of 400–1100 nm. The classification of internal-based defects was performed using partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), while the quantification of the internal defective area was based on partial least squares regression (PLSR). The PLS-DA double cross-validation accuracy for the distinction between non-defective and all internally defective potatoes was 90.78%. The double cross-validation classification accuracy achieved for pythium, bruising, and non-defective categories was 91.03%. The internal defective area model based on PLSR achieved a correlation coefficient of double cross-validation of 0.91 and a root mean square error of double cross-validation of 0.85 cm². This study makes a valuable contribution to advancing nondestructive techniques for evaluating internal defects in potatoes.

The objective of this study was to determine the physico-chemical properties in the high-amylose rice varieties. The rice flours were analyzed by RVA, DSC, HPAEC, resistant starch kit, SEM, spectrophotometer, etc. According to the RVA measurement of rice flours, the pasting temperature of Dodamssal was higher than those of the others. The proportion of amylopectin short chains (DP 6-12) of the Dodamssal was significantly lower than that of the others. The contents of amylose and resistant starch in the high-amylose rice flours ranged from 19.03% to 38.71% and from 0.6% to 12.39%, respectively. In SEM images, starch granules within Ilmibyeo, Mimyeon, Saegoami rice flours displayed polyhedrons different from those (relatively spherical morphology) of Dodamssal rice flour. According to the DSC results of rice flours, there were significant differences in the onset, peak temperatures of the endothermic peak. Gelatinization enthalpy was 4.52-6.3 J/g, with the lowest change in Dodamssal rice flour