Instrumental Estimation of Bacterial Population

Several publications have been presented during recent years describing the application of various scanning devices for automatic counting or differentiation of cells stained with fluorochromes (Mellors and Silver, 1951; Mellors, Glassman, and Papanicolaou, 1952; and Loeser and Berkley, 1954). Most of these publications describe studies performed on cells obtained from tissue sections or on cancer cells derived from the secretions of certain anatomic sites. To the best knowledge of the authors, no mention is made in the literature of the application of electronic scanning techniques to the quantitative detection of bacteria. The purpose of this paper is to describe a technique for the quantitative estimation of bacterial populations. The method is based on the electronic quantitation of fluorescence emitted from bacterial cells stained with a suitable fluorochrome.