What does it take for a foodborne pathogen to survive a pinch of salt ? - bioinformatics and systems biology approaches to model food safety

Orateur : Aline METRIS (Institute of Food Research, Norwich, U.K.)

Predictive microbiology for food safety aims at predicting quantitatively the kin etics of growth or survival of foodborne pathogens in food. The growth rate, survival rate and probability of growth are modelled empirically as a function of environmental conditions such as the temperature, water activity or pH of the food. We will focus here on the effect of the addition of salt, one of the most ancient and common way of preserving food, which subjects the bacteria to an osmotic stress to which some may survive. Whilst we can predict empirically the effect of salt on populations of E. coli, molecular mechanisms of adaptation are seldom studied. We show how systems biology approaches developed in biotechnology need to be adapted for predictive microbiology because of the nature of environmental stress. We also highlight the differences between E.coli and foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella typhimurium SL1344 which although having more than 80% homologous genes, behave differently in case of osmotic stress. We propose bioinformatics pipelines to infer molecular interaction networks of Salmonella for which data are scarce from E. coli.

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