Stochastic methods to model bacterial growth and food safety risks: Some perspectives

摘要

Food safety risks depend on bacterial numbers. At low population numbers, the heterogeneity between individuals and its influence on the division times become critical. It has been observed experimentally that a major descriptor of bacterial growth and division is the cellular size (volume). In this work, we present, a general theory to describe cellular size using stochastic differential equations. We derive its equivalent modified Fokker-Planck equation and use this partial differential equation to estimate critical parameters, like macroscopic growth rates, based on experimental size distributions measured by flow cytometry.