ABSTRACT
Bread is commonly referred to as fast food and it provides essential dietary minerals mostly Magnesium, Calcium, Potassium, and Iron. It is also easily prone to fungal attacks causing bread spoilage. As a result, crucial economic loss occurs to both consumers and producers. Contamination of bread by fungi may be from the air, bakery surface, equipment, food handlers, or raw materials. Fungus, yeast, and mould infest bread having suitable environmental conditions for their microbial activity. Yeast forms visible growth (white chalk-like spots) on bread and they multiply rapidly. A known standardized system called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point is used to identify potential hazards in the production process at various points and ensure hygienically produced bread. Fungi also produce mycotoxins that are harmful to both humans and animals. For years, the bakery industry has been working to identify treatments that improve the safety of bread with a longer shelf-life to address this economic and safety challenge. Chemical preservatives such as propionates, sorbates, and benzoates are been replaced with bio-preservatives such as microbial fermentation using lactic acid bacteria strains and yeast, various oils, and plant extracts. The materials and methods comprise the collection of bread samples from ten different stores in Benin-City, the method used is Isolation technique, Identification by wet mount and fluorescence microscopy, and the disk diffusion method for anti-fungal susceptibility. The result obtained was gotten by counting the colonies grown on the culture medium (Potato Dextrose Agar) and the mean of the duplicate was then calculated, and measuring the zones of inhibition. Some fungal microorganisms seen viewed under the microscope are; Aspergillus niger, Rhizopus stolonifer, Penicillium citrinum, Alternaria alternata, and Fusarium oxysporum.
