lecture notes Module 4 part1.doc

Lecture notes for Module 4 Part 1: Growth models Tiny van Boekel, PDQ N.B. This is an adapted version of Chapter 12 from the book Kinetic modelling of Reactions in foods, M.A.J.S. van Boekel, CRC Press 2008. Introduction The microbial quality of food is of utmost importance. It is in fact the first and foremost task of a food technologist to produce safe food. The risk of contamination and growth of pathogenic micro-organisms is much larger than that of toxic or mutagenic substances. Foods are very vulnerable to microbes because the required nutrients for microbial growth are usually present in sufficient amounts. In addition, foods may contain spoilage-inducing micro-organisms. Thus, it is very important to be able to calculate how fast micro-organisms will grow in a food. Having such knowledge is the basis for prediction of shelf life in relation to microbial activity, calculation of risks, and optimization of fermentation processes. Microbial growth is typically a kinetic problem, so it is appropriate to discuss some principles in this book. However, at the same time microbial kinetics is different from chemical kinetics discussed hitherto. In previous chapters, kinetics was related mostly to molecular events but with microbial kinetics it is about changes in numbers of cells, and, though superficially the equations may look the same, the underlying principle is different: it is about population dynamics. Growth, resulting in the increase of number of cells, is the result of uncountable molecular events, and requires a different treatment. The kinetics of microbial cell growth depends on the extracellular chemical environment (pH, ionic strength, water activity, presence of nutrients, temperature) and on the intracellular environment (mainly resulting in numerous enzymatic reactions). The resulting growth is the interplay between extracellular and intracellular conditions. Predictive microbiology, as this field of research is called, has been booming the