Engineering modeling frameworks for microbial food safety at various scales

摘要: The landscape of mathematical model‐based understanding of microbial food safety is wide and deep, covering interdisciplinary fields of food science, microbiology, physics, and engineering. With rapidly growing interest in such model‐based approaches that increasingly include more fundamental mechanisms of microbial processes, there is a need to build a general framework that steers this evolutionary process by synthesizing literature spread over many disciplines. The framework proposed here shows four interconnected, complementary levels of microbial food processes covering sub‐cellular scale, microbial population scale, food scale, and human population scale (risk). A continuum of completely mechanistic to completely empirical models, widely‐used and emerging, are integrated into the framework; well‐known predictive microbiology modeling being a part of this spectrum. The framework …