The majority of Clostridium spp. of relevance to the food industry possess
the metabolic ability to reduce sulphite to sulphide under anaerobic
conditions to generate cell energy (Wilson and Blair, 1924; Prevot, 1948;
Weenk et al., 1995). Clostridia with this phenotype are identified as SRCs.
It should be noted that there is an abundance of sulphite reducing bacteria
that do not belong to the class Clostridia. These bacteria fall within the
confines of the taxonomically diverse, yet phenotypically similar (at least
with respect to agar-based assays designed to detect SRCs), group of microbes
known as the sulphite reducing bacteria (SRBs).