“…Fungi can be particularly troublesome, because they can adapt to the environment of the food and can be difficult to detect on conventional plating media within the standard incubation times. In yogurts, yeasts often grow slowly in conventional laboratory plating methods, but as few as 10 CFU/ml were detectable after 16 h of incubation by PCR amplification of the conserved region of their 18S rRNA (García et al, 2004). Several investigators (Ingham and Ryu, 1995;Vlaemynck, 1994;Beuchat, Nail, Brackett, & Fox, 1990) have made comparisons of a number of alternative yeast and mold detection methods in shredded cheese, hard and soft cheeses, cottage cheese, yogurt, and sour cream, and found that, while results for all of the methods were statistically similar, price, speed, and convenience of use are often overarching considerations when users choose a method.…”