Hello,
1.take 1g homogenized sample in sterile tube
2. add 9ml of sterile saline water and mix well.
3. Take from prepared solution 1ml in new sterile tube and add again 9ml sterile saline water to make decimal dilutions and continue as you see in a picture. Depends which microorganism you looking for you shuld take appropreate media.
For fungi quantification you can use Czapek medium, for bacteria meat peptone agar is ok.
You need to think about what you want to measure, and accept that no matter which technique you use, you'll have artifacts. A count of colony-forming units may not tell you in great detail what is happening in the soil: was the CFU a dormant spore or a metabolizing mycelium, and does it matter to you? Does your technique tear a single organism into a hundred pieces, each counting as a CFU? Does your medium select for fast growing organisms, leaving fastidious ones undetected? You are correct to ask this online to get a variety of opinions. Czapek medium, for instance, is a minimal medium that will pick up slow growers as well as fast-growing organisms. PARPH is a very selective medium that will only culture out Phytophthora. There are many media to choose from.
Growing mycelial fungi are not effectively "countable" by culture methods. As Nina pointed out - your fungal "count" by culture will be driven more by dormant spores than actively growing fungal elements.
You'll also find that bacterial count by culture is much < what you'd see if you were able to examine the same sample microscopically as many soil bacteria do not grow/grow well on conventional media.
link below, is a good paper from Japan, regarding method for counting Bacteria and Fungi.
Regards
https://waset.org/publications/9281/numbers-and-biomass-of-bacteria-and-fungi-obtained-by-the-direct-microscopic-count-method
Klironomos, J. N., P. Mouroglis, B. Kendrick and P. Widden. 1993. A Comparison of spatial heterogenecity of VAM fungi in two maple-forest soil. Can. J. Bot. 71: 1472 – 1480.
You can use of this method for counting the spores of arboscular vesicular mycorrhiza in soil or rhizosphere.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Biota
- Eukaryota
- Fungi