S63: How the species concept affects microbial risk assessment in data limited scenarios

Microbial risk assessments have a variety of purposes ranging from mitigation of the effects of outbreaks and incidents, or evaluating effectiveness of approaches used for preventing undesirable microbial impacts, to predicative assessments of the employment of microorganisms for desirable purposes. In the former cases, assessments are generally retrospective, utilizing data gathered from evaluation of events that have transpired. In the latter, since the events have not yet taken place, assessments must rely on data associated with analogs of the expected uses and data are usually limited. One such example is the use of microbial risk assessment to evaluate industrial microorganisms prior to their manufacture or use. Data are often unavailable for the subject organism and expected behaviors must be predicted using data on close analogs. The closest analogs may be other strains of the same species, but determination of the species identity of an isolate can be problematic. This presentation will discuss the effects of the evolution of the species concept for bacteria on the ability to determine species identity in a regulatory environment.