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Log reduction is a measure of how thoroughly a decontamination process reduces the concentration of a contaminant. It is defined as the common logarithm of the ratio of the levels of contamination before and after the process, so an increment of 1 corresponds to a reduction in concentration by a factor of 10.
What is often called a "log reduction" (technically a reduction by one order of magnitude) represents a 90% reduction in microbial population. Thus a process that achieves a "6-log reduction" (10 −6 ) will theoretically reduce an initial population of one million organisms to very close to zero.
From this perspective, D-values can be understood as roughly analogous to half lives of radioactive substances, however a half life involves a reduction of 50% rather than 90%. The half life is actually roughly 30% (log 10 2 ≈ 30.103%) of the D-value, so if D = 10 minutes, the number of living microorganisms will be halved in about 3 minutes.
[1] Z-value is a term used in microbial thermal death time calculations. It is the number of degrees the temperature has to be increased to achieve a tenfold (i.e. 1 log 10) reduction in the D-value. The D-value of an organism is the time required in a given medium, at a given temperature, for a ten-fold reduction in the number of organisms.
In comparison to batch culture, bacteria are maintained in exponential growth phase, and the growth rate of the bacteria is known. Related devices include turbidostats and auxostats. When Escherichia coli is growing very slowly with a doubling time of 16 hours in a chemostat most cells have a single chromosome. [1]
Specialist companies will often advertise a certain log reduction, e.g., 6-log reduction or 99.9999% effective, instead of sterilization. This takes into consideration a phenomenon known as light and dark repair ( photoreactivation and base excision repair , respectively), in which a cell can repair DNA that has been damaged by UV light.
The tech sector has kicked off the new year with a spate of fresh job cuts that are coming at the same time as the industry is doubling down on investments into artificial intelligence.
The target of reduction in canning is the 12-D reduction of C. botulinum, which means that processing time will reduce the amount of this bacteria by a factor of 10 12. The D R for C. botulinum is 0.21 minute (12.6 seconds). A 12-D reduction will take 2.52 minutes (151 seconds).