I have to measure the growth of the bacteria in a piece of fabric for my senior design project. I don't know how to measure it. The only way that I know is by the naked eye or by the microscope. Is there any way another than these?
If there is not, can I have similar articles that are related to the experiment that I will do?
You need to provide a bit more detail in order to get some suggestions. I don't understand whether you are looking at contamination, or inhibition of growth by the fabric, or what you are looking at. What kind of bacteria are you measuring, etc.
A little more information is needed to help answer your question properly. However, measuring bacterial growth with the naked eye can be problematic on its own. Depending on the bacterial species, some of the growth might be flatter and more wide spread through the fabric than other species, for example if the bacteria were motile. You could try and elute a known volume of bacteria out of the fabric and use a haemocytometer for a cell count. Without more information on your experimental approach, and what you're aiming to achieve, it's difficult to point you in any direction.
https://microbiologysociety.org/why-microbiology-matters/what-is-microbiology/bacteria/observing-bacteria-in-a-petri-dish.html
https://microbiologysociety.org/why-microbiology-matters/what-is-microbiology/bacteria/observing-bacteria-in-a-petri-dish.html
I agree with both Benedik and Wilkes, you need to provide a bit more detail about what have you done and what are you looking for.
However if you are just interested in the total counts, you may elute the piece of fabric in measured amount of sterilized distilled water or saline (the volume will depend upon the size of piece, to be on safe side suspend in 5 ml). Vortex mix and then plate a little amount (100 ul) on nutrient agar or any suitable medium as per your requirement. After overnight incubation, you may count the colonies using colony counter or even manually. This number will represent the CFU in 100 ul, which you can calculate for the total eluted volume and that will be the total viable count on the piece of fabric.
You'll need to run controls to estimate the efficiency of bacterial recovery from fabric. Vortex speaks to a small piece of material - easier to manipulate but pretty irrelevant to real world signficance. Suggest you use fabric in context of real world use and recover using stomacher - e.g. https://www.thomassci.com/Equipment/Blenders/_/Stomacher-400-Circulator-Lab-Blender?q=Stomacher
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