Abstract:In order to reduce the use of essential oil as a preservative, the combinations of essential oil components were chosen and their synergistic inhibition on the quorum sensing of Erwinia carotovora was studied. Based on the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and fractional inhibitory concentration (FIC) of Erwinia carotovora, four combinations of essential oil components exhibiting synergistic antibacterial effect with hexanal were selected. Subsequently, Chromobacterium violaceum 026 (CV026) and Erwinia carotovora were adopted to screen the essential oil combinations with synergistic inhibitory effect on quorum sensing was presented. Furthermore, Q value was used to verify that only the combination of hexanal and geraniol showed a better synergistic quorum sensing inhibitory effect. Similarly, the effective concentration of this combination was about 1/8 to 1/16 of that in either hexanal or geraniol. Meanwhile, this combination showed a reasonably high inhibitory effect on the quorum sensing-related indicators of CV026 and Erwinia carotovora. Among them, the inhibition rates of violacein production, swimming, swarming, extracellular polysaccharide production, and biofilm formation were 52.91%, 58.19%, 51.49%, 65.03%, and 69.84%, respectively. The combination of hexanal and geraniol showed an obvious destructive effect on biofilm formation of Erwinia carotovora observed by scanning electron microscope and confocal laser scanning microscope. The results showed that this combination which had synergistic inhibitory effect on the quorum sensing of spoilage bacteria could effectively inhibit the spoilage characteristics of spoilage bacteria while reducing the actual use of essential oil components.