Spoilage mechanism and preservation technologies on the quality of shrimp: An overview

Shrimp is widely distributed and world-favored fishery products with increasing growth of market requirement. Nowadays, more and more consumers pay increasing attentions on the freshness and safety of aquatic products. However, shrimps are highly perishable and textural deterioration due to the combined actions of enzymatic proteolysis and microbial metabolism during post-harvest preservation and retailing procedures. Thus, developing practical and effective preservation technology to dramatically maintain quality of shrimp has attracted lots of attentions. This review provides a comprehensive overview of various preservation technologies (eg. modified atmosphere packaging, high pressure, food irradiation, cold plasma et al.) that have been investigated to guarantee the quality of shrimp underlying preservation mechanisms. The goal of this review is to critically update and discuss the spoilage mechanism and quality changes of shrimp during storage, and the recent advances preservation technologies on the quality of shrimp are also discussed. Besides, the advantages or disadvantages of each technology and limited applications of novel preservation technologies are also discussed. Shrimp spoilage immediately happen after death, the enzymatic proteolysis, microbiota composition and metabolism are the main factors that decrease freshness, texture and quality of shrimps. Traditional preservation technology has been widely used, but it still can't efficiently guarantee shrimp quality. Various novel preservation technologies have been successfully proposed to effectively prolong the shelf-life of shrimp with high quality, showing high market values throughout the supply chain of shrimps. However, extensive studies are still required to be performed to make them commercialized.