History

ComBase, a combined database of microbial responses to food environments, resulted from the integration of data from two independent, but similar initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1988, the UK Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (now the Food Standards Agency, FSA) initiated a coordinated programme to collect data on the growth and death of bacterial pathogens. Those data provided the base for the first validated, commercialised predictive package, Food MicroModel.  In parallel in the USA, the PMP program (Pathogen Modeling Program), a free package of validated models was developed at the Eastern Regional Research Center of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, USDA-ARS.

A structured database for the collection of published quantitative microbiology data was developed at the Institute of Food Research (IFR), Norwich, UK. The USDA-ARS, FSC, IFR and FSA have collaborated to incorporate all available data in this common database. The database was extended with data from European research institutions (data formatting and recording funded by the European Commission), data from members of the USDA-ARS Center of Excellence in Microbiology Modeling and Informatics (CEMMI) and data compiled from scientific literature at IFR, FSC and USDA-ARS. This unified database was called ComBase.

In May 2003, the Chief Executive of the FSA, the Director of IFR, the Director of the ARS Eastern Regional Research Center, and the USDA-ARS National Program Leader, signed a Concordat to affirm their commitment to support the development, coordination and exploitation of ComBase. As a result of this agreement, the USDA-ARS developed a web-based browser that accessed data in the IFR ComBase database. The Internet version of ComBase was launched in June 2003. Since then, the database has been expanded and the number of records now exceeds 50,000. In 2006, the University of Tasmania Food Safety Centre (FSC) joined ComBase as a partner, adding thousands of records, including growth/no-growth boundary data, and enhancing functions of ComBase for the food industry. As from the 19th of November 2010, the FSA is no longer a member of the ComBase consortium.

In the last few years, very significant improvements were made to ComBase, specifically in the search and output features. These include: 

• searching by food, organism and environmental condition
• searching by source (i.e. data donor)
• searching dynamic data
• more detailed and user-friendly results pages
• integration of modelling tools with the results.

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