Abstract
In microbiology it is often necessary to determine the number of viable cells in a sample or culture of interest. This is usually achieved by plating out the sample (diluted as required) on to an agar plate (Postgate 1969; Hattori 1988). There are several problems associated with this technique, the greatest of which is the length of time required to obtain the results. For some slowly growing organisms (e.g. Mycobacteria) it may take in excess of a week to determine how many cells were “viable” in the original sample, and even when the sample contains fast-growing organisms and the plates are incubated under optimal growth conditions a minimum of overnight growth is usually required before the resulting colonies can be counted. For some clinical specimens even an overnight incubation may be too long to be of use and consequently many alternatives to plate counts have been proposed in order to decrease the time required to determine numbers of viable cells (Harris and Kell 1985).
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Davey, H.M., Kaprelyants, A.S., Kell, D.B. (1993). Flow Cytometric Analysis, Using Rhodamine 123, of Micrococcus luteus at Low Growth Rate in Chemostat Culture. In: Lloyd, D. (eds) Flow Cytometry in Microbiology. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2017-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2017-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-2019-3
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