Determination of the number of cultured bacteria is essential for scientific and industrial practice. A spread plate technique is the most common and accurate method for counting of microorganisms. However, time consuming incubation does not allow for a quick estimation of the number of bacteria in a growing culture. In the present study, the results of photometric measurements: direct optical ...

Pharmacopeial microbiological tests detect and/or enumerate microbes that replicate in the presence of microbiological media. The challenge presented by adopting modern rapid microbiological methods is determining whether or not they represent the automation of a current compendial method or if they represent an “alternative” to a compendial method. The answer impacts how a firm should qualify ...

The presence of colonised patients is one of the main routes for the spread of multiresistant bacteria, and its containment is a clinical and public health priority. Surveillance studies are essential for early detection of colonisation by these bacteria. This article discusses the different microbiological methods, both based on culturing and molecular methods, for detection of carriers of mul...

Rapid diagnosis of pathogens is decisive to guarantee adequate therapy in infections: culture methods are precise and sensitive, but rather slow. New resources are available to enable faster diagnosis, and the most promising is MALDI-TOF technology: mass spectrometry applied to microbiological diagnosis. Times as fast as 10 to 15 minutes to etiological diagnosis are possible after a positive bl...

Neonatal sepsis is a major cause of neonatal mortality and morbidity. The current gold standard for diagnosis of sepsis, namely blood culture, suffers from low sensitivity and a reporting delay of approximately 48-72 h. Rapid detection of sepsis and institution of antimicrobial therapy may improve patient outcomes. Rapid and sensitive tests that can inform clinicians regarding the institution o...

The aim of this study was to investigate diagnostic methods for cryptococcal meningitis (CM). A retrospective analysis was conducted for 31 patients with CM confirmed by etiologic detection of cerebrospinal fluid in our hospital in the past 5 years. Nineteen cases in 31 patients were confirmed with CM in the first diagnosis, with a misdiagnosis rate of 38.7%. The positive rates of cryptococcus ...

the objective of this study was to assess the microbial contamination of razavi khorasan (iran) hot red pepper. the natural occurrence of aflatoxins and ochratoxin a in those samples was also investigated. for this purpose, 36 samples of this kind of pepper were collected from a farm and sun-dried. standard and established methods were used for both microbiological analyses and mycotoxins ident...

There has been continued effort in recent years to improve the routine methods of serum folate estimation. The aim has been to make them simpler and more economical to perform while providing more reliable results. Methods have recently become available which claim a number of advantages over conventional bioassays. Here we compare two new methods, a radioisotope method and a fully automated mi...

One of the oldest unresolved microbiological phenomena is why only a small fraction of the diverse microbiological population grows on artificial media. The "uncultivable" microbial majority arguably represents our planet's largest unexplored pool of biological and chemical novelty. Previously we showed that species from this pool could be grown inside diffusion chambers incubated in situ, like...