1 – Predictive Microbiology

: Overall, the models developed in predictive microbiology aim at the quantification of the effects of intrinsic, extrinsic and/or processing factors on the resulting microbial proliferation in food products or food model systems, for example, a buffer system. These models rely on the possibility to interpolate the resulting microbial proliferation for combinations that are not only originally examined, but also included in the range of the experiment design. As such, predictive microbiology can be considered as a powerful tool to investigate and summarize succinctly the effect of varying conditions (within food formulation and processing) on the microbial ecology. A historical perspective of modeling developments in the area of predictive microbiology was presented by Mafart in 2005. According to that, the first developments date back to 1920s when heat resistance of microorganisms was described by either the Arrhenius equation or the Bigelow model. Nevertheless, the principles and goals of the discipline appeared much later, at the beginning of the 1990s, followed by the development and description of microbial models and the generation of relevant databases and other software tools.