Statistical inferences about injury and persistence of environmentally stressed bacteria

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Abstract
SUMMARY: A standard technique for ascertaining the survival characteristics of bacteria after being environmentally stressed is to incubate the bacteria on both selective and non-selective media and count the colonies produced. Based on these colony counts, indexes of injury and persistence of the bacteria are calculated. To compare the stress of two different environments, a persistence ratio is calculated. In this paper, methods of statistical inference concerning these indexes and ratios are presented. These statistical methods use well-known procedures for analysis of binomial data and 2 × 2 table data, and are appropriate when the colony counts follow a Poisson distribution.