Enterobacter sakazakii survives spray drying

Four strains of Enterobacter sakazakii were inoculated into 35% reconstituted skim milk at 10⁷ and 10² cfu/g dry wt. After spray-drying in a Buchi mini spray drier (inlet 160°C and outlet 90°C), the resulting powders were analysed for E. sakazakii by enrichment and enumeration. In all cases, E. sakazakii survived the spray drying process and were detected in the powders with a low inoculum and enumerated in all the powders with the high inoculum for at least 12 weeks. The results emphasize that the controls in place to prevent E. sakazakii from getting to the spray drier are essential.     

Development of Tonal Centres and Abstract Pitch as Categorizations of Pitch Use

Modelling how people establish a sense of tonality and encode pitch invariance are important elements of research into musical cognition. This paper describes simulations of processes that induce classifications of pitch and interval use from a set of nursery-rhyme melodies. The classifications are identified with keys and degrees of the scale. The extractive process has been implemented in various forms of shunting, adding and tracking memory, and ART2 networks, Kohonen feature maps and feedforward nets are used as classifiers, in modular combinations. In the model, stable tonal centres emerge as general categories of pitch use over the short to medium term, while degree categories emerge from classifying interval use over the longer term. The representations of degree reflect the similarity relations between degrees. Overall, this research is concerned with the problem of how to abstract representations of sequences in a way that is both resilient and adaptive. It uses various extractive processes cooperatively to derive consistent representations from sequences of pitches, and shows that by using information generated within one process it is possible to guide the development of another, in this case functional representation.     

Enterobacter sakazakii: biological properties and significance in dried infant milk formula (IMF) powder†

Enterobacter sakazakii is an emerging opportunistic pathogen associated with rare but life‐threatening cases of meningitis, necrotizing enterocolitis and sepsis in premature infants. The bacterium has been isolated at low levels from dried infant milk formulas and is a cause of concern to all manufacturers. The threat posed by E. sakazakii is further compounded by a paucity of knowledge in key areas, specifically its ecology and physiology. This organism now represents a serious challenge to all those involved in the manufacture of infant formula products.