PMM-Lab – A community resource for integrated Predictive Microbial Modelling (PMM)

The prediction of growth and inactivation of microorganisms in food matrices is a field of intensive research with increasing relevance to food safety professionals and public authorities. Today, large quantities of experimental and quality control data are available in comprehensive public or proprietary databases. Parallel to this, the mathematical foundation for the generation of predictive microbial models has been developed and is now available. Nevertheless, there is a gap in easy-to-use and transparent software solutions that enable food safety professionals to apply state-of-the art mathematical modeling concepts to their proprietary data. Furthermore, an integrated infrastructure for information management on raw data and generated models is missing. The software PMM-Lab has been specifically designed to address these gaps. It has been outlined right from the beginning as a community resource to allow broad application and joint development. PMM-Lab already provides many valuable data analysis and modeling features including modules to create, visualize, analyze, save, import, export and deploy predictive microbial models based on experimental data. Moreover, it allows consistent data management for the analyzed experimental data and generated models due to the integrated database. Technically, PMM-Lab is an extension of the open-source data integration and analysis platform KNIME (www.knime.org ) from which it inherits highly beneficial properties like modularity, flexibility, scalability and extensibility. PMM-Lab is designed to be used by laboratory scientists, food safety specialists or even modeling experts who wish to distribute their methods to a broad community. Users trying to answer fundamental research questions based on experimental data collections or looking for structure in their growing data and model collection will also find value in this software. The possible application areas are numerous and include the prediction of shelf life and food spoilage. PMM-Lab has been developed by the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Germany and is available for free at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmmlab/ under the GNU public license.