THE ATP ASSAY, A METHOD FOR MEASURING BIOLOGICAL ACTIVITY IN INDUSTRIAL WATER

摘要

Biological control is a key to good corrosion and deposition control in units using industrial water. The challenge in preventing microbiological fouling is to detect a problem early enough to prevent unpleasant consequences. Microbiological populations are difficult to measure, quickly to change, and hard to control. The determination of total ATP by the luciferin/luciferase enzymatic reaction may be used as an indicator of water microbiological quality. This technique has the advantage of rapid measurement of all of the microbiological organisms in the sample, in comparison with the traditional colony count techniques, which determine only aerobic bacteria and require long incubation periods. Industrial water samples drawn from open recirculating cooling systems were analyzed for: colony forming units (CFU) representing the microbial content and Relative Light Units (RLU) representing the total ATP content of samples. Water samples with high RLU and low CFU contain greater amounts of non-bacterial species (molds, algae, etc).