I am working in fungal fermentation of soybean meal and there is bacterial growth in them at times. I am trying to quantify fungal cell counts and bacterial cells; but I haven't been able to do at real time. I can plate them and the results come after 48 hours.
I am looking at ways to see if we can do that at real time. I was trying to use automated cell counters but apparently they consider fungal debris as bacterial cells.
Any ideas?
You could get a rough estimate of a bacteria/yeast ratio by a simple crystal violet staining and a light microscope. Then relate that to the cell counter results and later confirm with the plate technique.
you can use qPCR approach with fast chemistry and target pan-bacterial and pan-fungal or species (if needed) specific genes.
Traditionally quantification of bacterial growth is semi-quantitative using calibrated inoculation loops you can estimate visual bacterial colonies/ml growth on petri plates because you can determine whether the growth is bacterial or fungal. In that way you can also see the ratio of bacterial to fungal growth- however as you may already know fungi typically grow at a much slower rate. You could use light scatter of liquid cultures to detect changes in organic growth, but that would not distinguish between bacterial or fungal growth. Let me know if you want to discuss further. My email contact: [email protected]
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