The Origin of the Time Scale: A Crucial Issue for Predictive Microbiology

Alberto Schiraldi^1,

¹Formerly at the Department Food Environmental and Nutritional Sciences (DeFENS), University of Milan, Italy

Cite this paper

Alberto Schiraldi. The Origin of the Time Scale: A Crucial Issue for Predictive Microbiology. Journal of Applied & Environmental Microbiology. 2022; 10(1):35-42. doi: 10.12691/JAEM-10-1-4

Abstract

The collective behavior of microbial cells in a batch culture is the result of interactions among individuals and effects of the surrounding medium, which changes during the growth progress. A semi empirical model skips biological and physiological peculiarities of the microorganisms and focuses on the observed sigmoid shape of the growth curve that is a common feature of batch cultures of pro- and eukaryotic microorganisms. The model replaces the observed growth trend with the behavior of an ideal batch culture that undergoes an unperturbed duplication process. It leads one to recognize that: • the origin of the time scale for the microbes, θ, differs from that of the observer, t; • the absolute reference state for any batch culture is log (N) = 0 (no matter the log base) for θ = 0; • the cell duplication occurs after an active latency gap, θ₀, that decreases with increasing inoculum population, log₂(N₀) and increasing temperature; • θ₀ substantially differs from the lag phase, λ, considered by most authors; • the use of reduced variables allows gathering different growth curves in a single master plot; • the model applies to batch cultures which undergo change of the environmental conditions and predicts the width of the intermediate latency gap just after the change; • the expression for the decay trend of the microbial population allows definition of a parameter suitable to rank the effects of bactericidal drugs. The model justifies the demand of more restricted safety limits of microbial loads.

Keywords

predictive model, batch cultures, latency gap, time scale

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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