Quantification of in-vitro post-antibiotic effect based on the mean recovery-time. II: A comparison of colony counting versus photometric methods for the determination of bacterial growth

Abstract

In the preceding paper, a method for the quantification of the post-antibiotic effect (PAE) has been developed based upon the mean recovery-time of an antibiotic-treated bacterial population, showing that the mean recovery-time is determined by the area above a growth curve of the bacterial population. Such an area determination of PAE implies that this method is less likely to be influenced by the early portion of a growth curve and therefore less dependent on the ability of a technique to detect a minimum bacterial density (sensitivity limit). In this study, this implication is further demonstrated in theory and through experimentation. As a result, an approach to estimation of contribution of the early portion of a growth curve to the quantitation of PAE based on the mean recovery-time is derived. The PAE of ciprofloxacin on Escherichia coli ATCC 25922 was determined under different test conditions using colony count and optical density measurements for determining bacterial growth. Differences in durations of the PAE quantitated by the mean recovery-time from the colony count measured and optical density measured growth curves were not statistically significant (P greater than 0.05).