AOAC INTERNATIONAL Methods Committee Guidelines for Validation of Qualitative and Quantitative Food Microbiological Official Methods of Analysis

Abstract

Responding to a need for a guide for conducting Official Method validation studies of microbiological methods, AOAC utilized the experience of three microbiologists who have been active in the field of method validation. In collaboration, a document was prepared which covered the following areas: terms and their definitions associated with the Official Methods program (e.g., reference methods, alternative methods, and ruggedness testing), protocols and validation requirements for qualitative methods versus those for quantitative methods, the concept of the precollaborative study, ruggedness testing, tests for significant differences, performance indicators, and the approval process. After its preparation, this document was reviewed by the members of the Methods Committee on Microbiology and Extraneous Materials and by members of the Official Methods Board. Herein is presented the approved version of that document.

An evaluation of survival and detection of Campylobacter jejuni and C. coli in broiler caecal contents using culture-based methods

“…The isolation rates from direct culture on mCCDA were compared with isolation rates from the different selective media before and after enrichment by Chi-squared (v 2 ) analysis using the McNemar test (Feldsine et al 2002). At a 5% level of confidence, the hypothesis that the isolation rates for mCCDA direct culture and another method could not be considered significantly different was accepted if v 2 < 3AE84.…”

Contractile function recovery in severely injured gastrocnemius muscle of rats treated with either oleic or linoleic acid

“…The composition of fatty acids in gastrocnemius muscle (100 mg) was determined by gas chromatography, according methods previously described (Feldsine et al 2002;Ratnayake et al 2002). A similar procedure has been used in our studies (Afonso et al 2013;Hirabara et al 2013;Fariña et al 2014;de Santana et al 2015).…”

Description and validation of a rapid (1 h) flow cytometry test for enumerating thermophilic bacteria in milk powders

“…The guidelines published by Feldsine et al (2002) were used to assess the accuracy of the BactiFlow method compared with the plate count method. Accuracy, the close-ness of agreement on identical samples, between the test results obtained by the reference method and the test results obtained by the alternative method was the key criterion for analysis.…”