Analysis of Bacteria in Environmental and Medical Microbiology by Flow Cytometry

Abstract

Detection and quantification of specific bacteria play an important role in medical, environmental and food microbiology and can be achieved by various techniques. Many of these require enrichment and selective cultivation of the organism, followed by the identification of the isolate (e.g., by analysis of its metabolism or biochemical composition). Direct detection of specific bacterial genes is possible with gene probes and is a new promising tool (e.g., Datta et al. 1988), but in its current form also time-consuming because of extended hybridization and washing procedures.