Category: Microbiology Research

Research Blog: Predictive Microbiology (Vedish Bhatoolaul)

Thoughts and Analysis

This blog post is intended to be more of a collection of my personal thoughts, opinions and questions on the research area I am currently working on rather than a microbiologically correct treatise on the subject.

As a theoretical physicist, my microbiological insight will be rather limited and sparing at best; hence the conjectural and interrogative tone of this account.

Please note that this account is chronological and is being continuously updated. (Posts at the end of the account will be most up-to-date with findings compared to earlier ones.)

As you will eventually gather by reading my posts, I am working on building an Individual-based Model to try and predict bacterial growth and inactivation.

Discussions with Dr Baranyi at the Institute of Food Research

I have visited Dr József Baranyi, leader of the Computational Microbiology Research Group at BBSRC’s Institute of Food Research to discuss possible collaboration on predictive microbiology. We have strong interests in developing reliable ways of constructing models for non-isothermal predictive microbiology. Currently population level modelling is based on first order kinetics for both growth and inactivation. This model however, is only applicable on a very limited and constant temperature range. Both professional and home cooking, on the other hand, take raw food ingredients through rather complicated heat cycles which in turn violate the validity conditions of the model. We have two fourth year undergraduate students, Sergey Goryunov and Vedish Bhatoolaul, working on this project.