Search results for "predictive microbiology"

A new approach to predict the fish fillet shelf-life in presence of natural preservative agents

2017

Three data sets concerning the behaviour of spoilage flora of fillets treated with natural preservative substances (NPS) were used to construct a new kind of mathematical predictive model. This model, unlike other ones, allows expressing the antibacterial effect of the NPS separately from the prediction of the growth rate. This approach, based on the introduction of a parameter into the predictive primary model, produced a good fitting of observed data and allowed characterising quantitatively the increase of shelf-life of fillets.

Modeling the heat inactivation of foodborne pathogens in milk powder : High relevance of the substrate water activity

2017

International audience; Due to the ability of foodborne pathogens to survive in low moisture foods, the decontamination of these products is an important issue in food hygiene. Up to now, such decontamination has mostly been achieved through empirical methods. The intention of this work is to establish a more rational use of heat treatment cycles. The effects of thermal treatment cycles on the inactivation of dried Salmonella Typhimurium, Salmonella Senftenberg, Cronobacter sakazakii and Escherichia coli were assessed. Bacteria were mixed with whole milk powder and dried down to different water activity levels (0.11, 0.25, 0.44 and 0.58). The rate of inactivated bacteria was determined afte…

Noise Induced Phenomena in the Dynamics of Two Competing Species

2015

Noise through its interaction with the nonlinearity of the living systems can give rise to counter-intuitive phenomena. In this paper we shortly review noise induced effects in different ecosystems, in which two populations compete for the same resources. We also present new results on spatial patterns of two populations, while modeling real distributions of anchovies and sardines. The transient dynamics of these ecosystems are analyzed through generalized Lotka-Volterra equations in the presence of multiplicative noise, which models the interaction between the species and the environment. We find noise induced phenomena such as quasi-deterministic oscillations, stochastic resonance, noise …

Multilayer perceptron neural networks and radial-basis function networks as tools to forecast accumulation of deoxynivalenol in barley seeds contamin…

2011

The capacity of multi-layer perceptron artificial neural networks (MLP-ANN) and radial-basis function networks (RBFNs) to predict deoxynivalenol (DON) accumulation in barley seeds contaminated with Fusarium culmorum under different conditions has been assessed. Temperature (20-28 °C), water activity (0.94-0.98), inoculum size (7-15 mm diameter), and time were the inputs while DON concentration was the output. The dataset was used to train, validate and test many ANNs. Minimizing the mean-square error (MSE) was used to choose the optimal network. Single-layer perceptrons with low number of hidden nodes proved better than double-layer perceptrons, but the performance depended on the training …

Modeling of Sensory Characteristics Based on the Growth of Food Spoilage Bacteria

2016

During last years theoretical works shed new light and proposed new hypothesis on the mechanisms which regulate the time behaviour of biological populations in different natural systems. Despite of this, the role of environmental variables in ecological systems is still an open question. Filling this gap of knowledge is a crucial task for a deeper comprehension of the dynamics of biological populations in real ecosystems. In this work we study how the dynamics of food spoilage bacteria influences the sensory characteristics of fresh fish specimens. This topic is crucial for a better understanding of the role played by the bacterial growth on the organoleptic properties, and for the quality …

A stochastic interspecific competition model to predict the behaviour of Listeria monocytogenes in the fermentation process of a traditional Sicilian…

2008

The present paper discusses the use of modified Lotka-Volterra equations in order to stochastically simulate the behaviour of Listeria monocytogenes and Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB) during the fermentation period (168 h) of a typical Sicilian salami. For this purpose, the differential equation system is set considering T, pH and aw as stochastic variables. Each of them is governed by dynamics that involve a deterministic linear decrease as a function of the time t and an "additive noise" term which instantaneously mimics the fluctuations of T, pH and aw. The choice of a suitable parameter accounting for the interaction of LAB on L. monocytogenes as well as the introduction of appropriate nois…

Basis of predictive mycology.

2005

Abstract For over 20 years, predictive microbiology focused on food-pathogenic bacteria. Few studies concerned modelling fungal development. On one hand, most of food mycologists are not familiar with modelling techniques; on the other hand, people involved in modelling are developing tools dedicated to bacteria. Therefore, there is a tendency to extend the use of models that were developed for bacteria to moulds. However, some mould specificities should be taken into account. The use of specific models for predicting germination and growth of fungi was advocated previously [ Dantigny, P., Guilmart, A., Bensoussan, M., 2003. Basis of predictive mycology. In Proceedings of the 4th Internatio…

Role of Predictive Microbiology in Food Preservation

2012

Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Methods to Predict Growth of F. sporotrichioides and Production of T-2 and HT-2 Toxins in Treatments with Et…

2021

The efficacy of ethylene-vinyl alcohol copolymer films (EVOH) incorporating the essential oil components cinnamaldehyde (CINHO), citral (CIT), isoeugenol (IEG), or linalool (LIN) to control growth rate (GR) and production of T-2 and HT-2 toxins by Fusarium sporotrichioides cultured on oat grains under different temperature (28, 20, and 15 °C) and water activity (aw) (0.99 and 0.96) regimes was assayed. GR in controls/treatments usually increased with increasing temperature, regardless of aw, but no significant differences concerning aw were found. Toxin production decreased with increasing temperature. The effectiveness of films to control fungal GR and toxin production was as follows: EVOH…

Stochastic model for a biological complex system: analysis of the bacterial growth in food products

2012

The Physics of Complex Systems has recently taken a more and more important role in the description of natural systems because of the interactions, both deterministic and noisy, between such systems and the environment. In particular the noise plays a relevant role in biological systems, whose dynamics is strongly influenced by environmental variables subject to random fluctuations. In this work a stochastic model is exploited to reproduce the growth of bacteria in food of animal origin. Specifically the dynamics of a bacterial species, Listeria monocytogenes, is analyzed in the presence of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) during the period of the fermentation of meat products. The model, based o…