For example, when an inoculum is 5% in terms of v/v, what does the v/v percentage mean?
Also, how is this applied in industry?
Here's an example:
After adjusting the cell charge of your inoculum, and for a final volume of 1000 ml of an inoculated media, a 5% v/v inoculation means: you'll add 50 ml of the prepared inoculum to 950 ml of the media.
Cheers :)
This term is very often used once you have standardized your inoculation procedure. For bacteria o yeasts for example, you may count cells and establish that you are going to use a 10^8cells/mL-inoculum, or xx CFU/mL, or a given O.D. inoculum. But then, you need to standardize how much inoculum of this N° or density you are going to add for starting your next culture. Normally, one uses 5-10% v/v, which means what Dr. Belaouni detailed above. If you are setting a1L-culture you may add 50-100 mL of inoculum (or starter). Being strict, quantitatively, you should discount this volume from the total volume of culture (as Belaouni said). In the practice, at pilot plant scale or industrially, many times you directly add this 5-10% without discounting from the whole culture. The main thing is standardization, which assures you the possibility to reproduce your results EVERY time. Other relevant thing is to keep your inoculum, not only in the same proportion, BUT always in the same growth stage and equally activated. In the case of fungi, sometimes the inoculum processing is slightly different. You may neither count (except for conidia) nor measure OD. But you can add the same number of agar plugs per volume, or standardize by dry weight. Hope it serves. Success!
This show my experiences about thought the Saccharomyces cerevisiae quantity
http://biosaintropis.unisma.ac.id/index.php/biosaintropis/article/view/84
Dear Beshr,
As the previous researchers have stated, inoculum size refers to the initial ratio of microorganisms in relation to the total working volume of the process. For instance, if we look at your stated example, a 5 % v/v inoculum size of a 100ml process would mean you add 5ml of the inoculum to 95ml of the prepared media.Remember v/v means volume per volume. To make it easier, I would use a calculator to determine the exact volume where I input 100 x (5%) to get the size of the inoculum. This concept is applied in a similar manner industrially to produce may products such as beer, bread, antibiotics etc. I hope this helps. Good luck!
inoculum size is the required concentration of expected microorganism for a standard test. it is a believe to expect the standard suspension prepare is the inoculum size for a particular yield at different dilution rate for either pilot or industrial scale analysis.
In some occassions, cell concentrations can be estimated by the size of your inoculum dose. For example, a loopful of bacterial colony/cultures. Those are other adjustable parameters.
I think in case of bacterial culture the most important issue is the optical density of inoculum. Inoculum of OD approximately 1.0-1.2 should not be inoculated more than 5% mainly in case of aerobic bacterium.
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