Hello all,

I am about to start a project which is to identify a newly isolated bacteria as a causative pathogen to mass summer mortality in a marine mollusk. Briefly, this is a full-factorial design experiment that will involve bacterial infections (control/injection) with temperature treatments (ambient/ elevated), resulting in 9~12 treatment groups consisting of 10 animals. And I plan to sample the animals at different sampling time points (6-time points) which will end up with hundreds of animals (450~500) that need to be sacrificed for blood sampling. In this particular experiment, I am also attempting to determine a bacteria load after the animal challenge test.

Can someone suggest a suitable approach to quantify and detect bacteria in the presence of blood cells since we know if we use qPCR as a bacteria quantification method, it will not differentiate between live and dead bacteria? Another way of doing this based on literature is plate counting (in duplicate, around 3-4 serial dilutions of blood samples per animal) will also not be a doable method, just too many plates to spread, incubate and count, time-consuming and labor-intensive (according to a massive number of samples)?

Thanks for your assistance.