A model describing microbial inactivation and growth kinetics

A model based on the chance of collision between environmental water molecules having appropriate energy and microbial cells, and leading to description of both inactivation and growth kinetics is presented. Functions derived from the model can describe the known shapes of survival curves (concave, convex, sigmoid, linear, on semi-log plot), the tailing-off phenomenon, some prominent behaviour of growing population kinetics, and are provided with fair predictive power.