DEVIANT aims at providing a decision support tool for assessing the safety of bacterial strains
belonging to a species with a long history of use in fermentation or with a food-grade potential,
when they are implemented in new fermentation processes, for the fermentation of new food
substrates or for new applications (hereafter named novel conditions of use) for which there is
no hindsight on their safety. This tool will be based on comparing the behavior of a strain under
these novel conditions of use with the variability of the behaviors of the species under
traditional (standard) conditions of use. The absence of any difference in behavior under novel
conditions of use, considered then as substantially equivalent, would be interpreted as a
guarantee of safety. On the contrary, a significant deviation would reflect atypical behavior,
which could be perceived as a potential risk. This tool will also be applicable to the assessment
of newly isolated strains for which no data is yet available. In order to provide proof of concept
(POC) and develop this tool, the present work will be carried out with a species with welldocumented
use in dairy fermentation and GRAS status for these applications. Once POC has
been established, such a tool could be applied to other species of food interest, as well as to
species with ambiguous safety status, but used in food fermentation and bio-preservation. The
ultimate choice of the species for POC is at the discretion of the FdF’ COS.