Comparative study on the impact of equally stressful environmental sporulation conditions on thermal inactivation kinetics of B. subtilis spores.

Control of bacterial spores continues to be one of the main challenges for the food industry due to their wide dissemination and extremely high resistance to processing methods. Furthermore, the large variability in heat resistance in spores that contaminate foods makes it difficult to establish general processing conditions. Such heterogeneity not only derives from inherent differences among species and strains, but also from differences in sporulation environments that are generally ignored in spores encountered in foods.