Characterisation of the surface growth of in cheese agar media using predictive mathematical models.

The main objective of this work was to characterise the mycelial growth of , one of the fungal contaminants that appear frequently in the artisan cheese production environment. The study uses primary Baranyi and Huang models to compare their parameters and predict on cheese-based medium (CBA) under diverse environmental conditions (temperature range from 6 to 37 °C and 0 and 1 % NaCl concentration). However, the Baranyi model consistently estimated longer lag phases and higher surface growth rates () than the Huang model; both models showed adequate best-fit performance (exactly with the mean coefficient of determination = (0.