VIABLE BACTERIAL COUNTS BY AGAR-DROPLET TECHNIQUE

  • 1 January 1976
    • journal article
    • research article
    • Vol. 235  (4) , 527-553
Abstract
Agar droplet technique, flooding technique and pour plates gave similar results with gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria from medical routine materials. Comparing the arithmetic means, viable counts of Staphylococcus aureus were slightly higher from pour plates while Escherichia coli and Klebsiella aerogenes gave the highest counts on flooded plates. All 3 methods produced relatively low counts when the number of bacteria/sample was > 300. Counts < 10 allow only a very poor estimation of the actual number of bacteria. The variability of droplet counts with bacterial numbers > 25 was less than that of corresponding plate counts. Significant savings in materials, labor and incubation space are made with the agar droplet method.

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