| Summary: | Process validation studies often require the inoculation of select foodborne pathogens into targeted foods to determine the lethality of the process or antimicrobial ingredients, and quantitative recovery of surviving inoculum bacteria helps to make those assessments. Such processes introduce various stressors on the inoculated challenge microorganisms whereby traditional selective media are too harsh to enumerate the remaining viable and injured population quantitatively. Innate antibiotic resistance of challenge organisms has often been used to establish simple selective media (i.e., Tryptic Soy Agar/TSA + antibiotics) for recovering inoculated strains, but sometimes antibiotic resistant background microorganisms are higher than desired. <em>Salmonella </em>Thompson 120, <em>Salmonella </em>Heidelberg F5038BG1, <em>Salmonella </em>Hadar MF60404, <em>Salmonella </em>Enteritidis H3527, and <em>Salmonella </em>Typhimurium H3380 were characterized for antibiotic resistance and acid adaptation in Tryptic Soy Broth containing 0%, 0.25%, or 1.0% glucose. Sodium pyruvate was evaluated for recovery after stress but no enhancing effect was observed, possibly because the strains were acid-adapted. Selenite Cystine Broth, traditionally used as a selective enrichment broth, was used as the basis for Selenite Cystine Agar (SCA) in combination with three antibiotics to which our <em>Salmonella</em> are resistant. Serovars of <em>Salmonella</em>, both individually and in mixtures, were enumerated on TSA, SCA, Xylose Lysine Desoxycholate (XLD), and Hektoen Enteric (HE) selective agars (all containing the same antibiotics) after conditions of nutrient starvation, desiccation, acid stress, and thermal stress. The data show that quantitative enumeration of our <em>Salmonella</em> serovars on SCA was not significantly different (<em>p</em> > 0.05) than those achieved on TSA for all tested stress categories. Levels of <em>Salmonella</em> enumerated on XLD and/or HE were significantly different (<em>p </em>< 0.05) than on TSA and SCA and often more than 1−2-log lower, consistent with the inhibition of injured cells. These data confirm that SCA (+ antibiotics) is a suitable selective medium for enumeration of these acid-adapted <em>Salmonella</em> serovars as challenge organisms recovered from various conditions of stress.
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