The problem nanoemulsions solve is deceptively simple to state and notoriously difficult to fix. Polyphenols, plant essential oils, lipophilic vitamins, and natural pigments carry impressive antioxidant and antibacterial credentials, yet their journey from laboratory bench to supermarket shelf is blocked by low water solubility, rapid thermal and photodegradation, and poor intestinal absorption. Traditional micron-scale emulsions fare little better, prone to aggregation and phase separation during long-term storage. Nanoemulsions, with droplet sizes typically below 500 nanometers, hold their ground through strong Brownian motion that counteracts gravitational separation, reinforced by electrostatic repulsion that depends on interfacial charge and solution conditions. The result is dramatically improved solubility and stability for hydrophobic bioactive compounds, along with enhanced bioavailability driven by the micellization efficiency of the lipid composition itself.

Crucially, the review insists on a rigorous definition: a food-grade nanoemulsion is a colloidal dispersion stabilized by a food-grade emulsifier in which every ingredient, from the oil phase and emulsifier to cosurfactants, solvents, polymers, and encapsulated bioactives, meets regulatory purity standards and falls within established acceptable daily intake limits. This is not an academic nicety. As nanoemulsions migrate from pharmaceutical contexts into edible products, the distinction between what works and what is legally and safely deployable becomes the central question of the field.

Because nanoemulsions are kinetically stable non-equilibrium colloids, they cannot form spontaneously from oil and water alone; they demand external energy or clever physicochemical manipulation. The review organizes fabrication strategies into two families. High-energy methods, including high-pressure homogenization, ultrasonic emulsification, microfluidization, and rotor-stator homogenization, use intense mechanical forces to shear, impact, and cavitate large droplets into nanoscale fragments, allowing emulsifiers to align in ordered fashion at the oil-water interface. Low-energy methods, including phase inversion temperature and composition techniques, self-emulsification, membrane emulsification, and solvent displacement, exploit spontaneous molecular interactions and interfacial energy minimization to assemble tiny droplets with minimal mechanical input.

Each technique carries a distinct industrial signature. High-pressure homogenization, the workhorse of large-scale production, pushes crude emulsions through narrow valves at 50 to 100 megapascals, routinely achieving droplets below 200 nanometers; researchers have used it to produce 125-nanometer pepper essential oil nanoemulsions with strengthened antibacterial activity and astaxanthin carriers with improved photostability and oral bioavailability. Its costs are equally clear: expensive equipment, high energy consumption, and shear and heat that can denature proteins, depolymerize polysaccharides, and oxidize lipids. Ultrasonic emulsification, by contrast, is cheap and simple, using cavitation bubble collapse to shatter droplets into the 50-to-150-nanometer range, but uneven acoustic energy distribution demands repeated cycles and risks localized overheating, confining it largely to laboratory research. Microfluidization, which collides pressurized fluid streams inside fixed-geometry interaction chambers, delivers precise size control and narrow distributions at 50 to 207 megapascals, yet hardware costs and microchannel blockage keep it at small scale. Rotor-stator homogenization, tolerant of viscous feedstocks and inexpensive to install, typically leaves droplets between 100 and 500 nanometers and requires supplementary homogenization to meet nanoemulsion specifications.

The low-energy family trades mechanical brutality for formulation finesse. The phase inversion temperature method exploits the temperature-dependent hydration of nonionic surfactants: as temperature rises toward the PIT, dehydration flips the surfactant’s affinity from water-loving to oil-loving, creating bicontinuous microemulsion intermediates with ultra-low interfacial tension, and rapid cooling then locks nanoscale droplets into place. The phase inversion composition method achieves the same kinetic trapping at constant temperature by systematically shifting oil, water, and surfactant ratios, yielding DHA and EPA carriers as small as 112 nanometers with narrow polydispersity. Self-emulsification, driven by chemical potential gradients when oil-surfactant mixtures contact water, offers ultra-low energy consumption and excellent scalability, with transparent sesame oil nanoemulsions around 67 nanometers demonstrating the approach’s precision. Membrane emulsification extrudes the dispersed phase through uniform nanoporous membranes to generate monodisperse droplets under mild conditions, preserving delicate bioactives, while solvent displacement dissolves lipophilic compounds in water-miscible organic solvents that diffuse away to trigger self-assembly, though residual solvent removal imposes regulatory and environmental burdens that limit food-grade scalability.

Characterization, the review argues, is where many studies fall short. Droplet size distribution and the polydispersity index, measured primarily by dynamic light scattering and laser diffraction, form the structural foundation: optimal food applications typically require droplets below 200 nanometers, generating ultrahigh specific surface area and strong electrostatic repulsion that suppress creaming and sedimentation. A curcumin nanoemulsion averaging just 19.92 nanometers with a PDI of 0.17 exemplified exceptional stability and bioavailability. Zeta potential quantifies interdroplet electrostatic repulsion, with absolute values above 30 millivolts conventionally signaling good stability, though the review cautions that sterically stabilized systems using nonionic surfactants, proteins, or polysaccharides can remain stable at low charge, so zeta potential must be read alongside interfacial composition, ionic strength, and pH. Advanced tools round out the picture: pendant-drop and spinning-drop tensiometry for interfacial tension, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy for molecular interactions, differential scanning calorimetry for lipid phase transitions, nuclear magnetic resonance for diffusion behavior, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy for surface chemistry, each with artifacts that demand careful interpretation.

The applications emerging from this toolkit span three strategic sectors. In food quality improvement, essential oil nanoemulsions have kept probiotic viability above 8 log CFU per gram in yogurt over 28 days of refrigerated storage, extended apple juice shelf life from 7 to 21 days when combined with high-pressure homogenization, delayed potato sprouting by roughly 9 days through sustained methyl salicylate release, and stretched duck meat shelf life from 14 to 35 days using ginger essential oil carriers. In packaging, nanoemulsion-loaded biodegradable films are replacing conventional plastics, which accounted for about 36 percent of global plastic production in 2015 and dominate beach litter; cinnamon essential oil films for pork now double as freshness indicators, shifting color from bright brown to saddle brown as spoilage progresses, while anthocyanin-loaded chitosan and carrageenan systems respond to ammonia from deteriorating food. In functional foods, curcumin nanoemulsions replacing margarine improved bread’s antioxidant capacity, crumb elasticity, and pore uniformity, and basil seed hydrogel nanoemulsions fortified milk powder with vitamin D3 at 115.63 international units, nearly twenty times the level in unfortified spray-dried powder.

The review’s most sobering contribution is its evidence-level honesty. Bioaccessibility measured in simulated digestion, cellular uptake in Caco-2 models, pharmacokinetics in rats, and human trials represent a hierarchy of robustness, and the field remains heavily weighted toward the preliminary end. Encouraging signals exist: excipient nanoemulsions raised quercetin bioaccessibility 1.73-fold under the INFOGEST protocol and boosted rat bioavailability by 46.6 percent with systemic antioxidant capacity up 1.47-fold, while nanoencapsulated essential oils outperformed free oils against foodborne pathogens. Yet the authors flag a pronounced translational gap for lipophilic natural pigments such as astaxanthin, lycopene, and chlorophyll, where industrial-scale validation, long-term stability data, and systematic in vivo safety evaluation are still missing. Their prescription is a formulation-to-translation framework that weighs processing stability, gastrointestinal performance, sensory quality, safety, scalability, energy demand, and production feasibility collectively rather than treating droplet size or encapsulation efficiency as standalone proof of application potential. If the field heeds that call, the tiny droplets now confined to laboratory beakers may soon determine how the world’s food stays fresh, nutritious, and honestly labeled.

Subject of Research: Fabrication, characterization, and food industry applications of food-grade nanoemulsions

Article Title: Food-related nanoemulsions: Fabrication approaches, characterization methods, and emerging applications

Article References: Zhang, Z.-H., Zhang, K., Li, X., Qin, Y., Yan, J., & Gao, X. (2026). Food-related nanoemulsions: Fabrication approaches, characterization methods, and emerging applications. Current Research in Food Science, Article 101591. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crfs.2026.101591

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: nanoemulsions, food science, bioactive compounds, essential oils, high-pressure homogenization, phase inversion, bioavailability, food packaging, intelligent packaging, natural pigments, colloidal stability, functional foods

The starting material is deceptively ordinary. Aspergillus niger, the black mold long used to produce citric acid and enzymes at industrial scale, generates large quantities of spent mycelial biomass that is typically discarded or undervalued. Within its cell walls, however, lies a natural composite: chitin microfibrils entangled and covalently associated with glucan polysaccharides. This chitin–glucan architecture is, in effect, a prefabricated nanocomposite produced by biology itself. Unlike crustacean shell waste, which requires energy-intensive demineralization to remove calcium carbonate, fungal biomass is essentially mineral-free, giving it a favorable sustainability profile for chitin extraction. The Tianjin team cultivated A. niger in potato dextrose medium containing 12 grams per liter of potato extract and 60 grams per liter of glucose over 96 hours, producing a dense mycelial mat that served as the raw material for nanofiber fabrication.

The extraction strategy combines three sequential treatments. First, alkaline processing removes proteins and other soluble impurities from the cell wall matrix, enriching the insoluble chitin–glucan fraction. Second, a controlled partial deacetylation converts a proportion of the N-acetyl groups on the chitin backbone into free amine groups, generating chitosan-like character along the fiber surface. This chemical modification is critical: the newly exposed cationic amino groups are responsible for much of the material’s antibacterial behavior and improve its colloidal stability in water. Third, high-pressure homogenization subjects the chemically treated biomass to intense mechanical shear and cavitation forces that disentangle the cell wall architecture into individual nanofibers. The resulting partially deacetylated chitin–glucan complex nanofibers, or CGCNFs, have an average diameter of just 9.86 plus or minus 1.86 nanometers and an aspect ratio of approximately 25, meaning the fibers are slender ribbons a few dozen times longer than they are wide—an ideal geometry for reinforcing polymer films.

The economics of the process may prove as consequential as the science. Compared with conventional routes to chitin nanofibers, the proposed workflow achieved a 15 to 48 percent increase in nanofiber yield and reduced raw material costs by 75 to 81 percent. These gains stem partly from the choice of feedstock and partly from process integration, which avoids the harsh acid treatments and demineralization steps that inflate the cost and environmental footprint of crustacean-derived chitin. In a circular bioeconomy framework, spent microbial biomass from existing fermentation industries could feed directly into nanomaterial production, turning a disposal liability into a revenue stream. The authors position this as a sustainable strategy for biomass conversion and renewable polysaccharide fabrication, with the numbers to back up the claim.

Structural characterization confirmed that the treatment regimen did more than simply defibrillate the cell wall. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and solid-state carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy collectively revealed enhanced surface functionalization of the nanofibers. The spectroscopic signatures showed increased exposure of amine groups alongside the preserved crystalline chitin core, a combination that underpins both the fibers’ reactivity and their mechanical integrity. Solid-state NMR, a technique particularly well suited to probing unlabeled fungal cell walls, allowed the researchers to track the chemical environment of the chitin and glucan carbons through each processing stage, verifying that partial deacetylation proceeded without destroying the glucan–chitin association that makes these fibers a natural composite rather than a mixture of separate polymers.

The most striking result is the antibacterial performance. The CGCNFs inhibited more than 99 percent of Escherichia coli, a Gram-negative bacterium, and Staphylococcus aureus, a Gram-positive pathogen. The mechanism is thought to follow the established antimicrobial behavior of chitosan-like polymers: the protonated amine groups on the fiber surfaces carry a positive charge at physiological pH, promoting electrostatic adhesion to the negatively charged bacterial cell envelope. In Gram-negative organisms this interaction disrupts the outer lipopolysaccharide membrane, while in Gram-positive species it interferes with the thick peptidoglycan layer and the cell membrane beneath, ultimately causing leakage of intracellular contents and loss of viability. Because the antimicrobial functionality is intrinsic to the biopolymer rather than added as a leachable additive, CGCNF-based materials could offer a durable and food-safe alternative to synthetic antimicrobial agents in packaging.

To demonstrate real-world utility, the team blended the nanofibers into polyvinyl alcohol, a water-soluble synthetic polymer widely used in films and coatings. The resulting CGCNF/PVA composite films displayed a tensile modulus of 4.2 gigapascals, a 162.5 percent increase relative to neat PVA films. This dramatic stiffening reflects classic nanocomposite reinforcement physics: rigid nanofibers dispersed at high aspect ratio form an interconnected network within the polymer matrix, efficiently transferring stress and restricting polymer chain mobility. The hydrogen-bonding compatibility between the hydroxyl-rich PVA and the hydroxyl- and amine-bearing surfaces of the nanofibers further strengthens the interface. The outcome is a multifunctional film that is simultaneously stronger, stiffer, and antibacterial—precisely the property combination sought for active food packaging that extends shelf life while resisting microbial spoilage.

The significance of the work extends beyond a single material system. Fungal sources of chitin have attracted growing attention as ecologically preferable alternatives to crustacean shells, with prior studies screening the sustainability and physicochemical properties of chitin and chitin–glucan across dozens of fungal species and assessing the environmental impact of nanofibril isolation from fungi compared with shrimp and crab shells. Previous efforts have produced fungal chitin nanopapers, heavy-metal-adsorbing filtration membranes, hemostatic hydrogels, and chitin nanofibers from mushroom extracts. The Tianjin study contributes a process-technology link that many of these works lacked: a route that is simultaneously high-yielding, low-cost, and compatible with industrially familiar unit operations such as alkaline extraction and high-pressure homogenization, applied to one of the most widely cultivated fungi in existence.

Challenges remain before fungal nanofibers reach commercial films and coatings. Scaling mycelium production and maintaining consistent cell wall composition across fermentation batches will demand tight bioprocess control, and the long-term migration behavior, biodegradation profile, and regulatory status of partially deacetylated chitin–glucan nanofibers in food-contact materials will need thorough evaluation. Nevertheless, the combination of a 9.86-nanometer fiber diameter, stronger-than-neat composite films, near-total bacterial inhibition, and an 81 percent reduction in raw material cost makes a compelling case that the next generation of antibacterial bioplastics may be grown, not drilled. As the biotechnology industry continues to generate mountains of spent fungal biomass, processes like this one suggest that the humble cell wall of Aspergillus niger may become one of the most valuable nanomaterial feedstocks of the coming decade.

Subject of Research: Extraction of antibacterial chitin–glucan nanofibers from Aspergillus niger fungal biomass for sustainable biopolymer films

Article Title: Extraction of nanochitin–glucan composite from Aspergillus niger with enhanced antibacterial activity

Article References: Ba, W., Che, M., Cui, M., Su, R., & Huang, R. (2026). Extraction of nanochitin–glucan composite from Aspergillus niger with enhanced antibacterial activity. Polymer Bulletin, 83(11), Article 637. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00289-026-06692-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00289-026-06692-z

Keywords: Aspergillus niger, chitin-glucan complex, nanofibers, antibacterial activity, fungal biomass, bioplastics, high-pressure homogenization, deacetylation, polyvinyl alcohol, food packaging, waste valorization, Polymers Bulletin