PREDICTING the dynamics of bacterial spore pop-ulations under heat treatment at lethal temperatures is of fundemental importance to the design, control, and validation of optimum thermal processes for commercial sterilization of food and pharmaceutical products. The dynamics of spore populations during thermal processes were analyzed to determine reasons for substantial discrepancies commonly found between predictions by conventional models and experimental data. From this research a new model was developed that incorporated several microbiological transformations of sporesactivation, inactivation, and injury-related activation of alternative germination mechanismsin accordance with the theory of population dynamics. Isothermal experiments were conducted to obtain parameters of the model and to test its ability to predict dynamics of survivor spore populations. The data used were for B. subtilis in water and C. botulinum in olive oil. The model was found to describe consistently and precisely the dynamics of bacterial spores treated at constant lethal temperature.
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Rodríguez et al. (1991) studied this question.