Environmental monitoring (EM) remains an essential detection tool for cleanrooms within healthcare and pharmaceuticalmanufacturing facilities. During monitoring, an agar growth medium is incubated at a specific temperature for a set time. There is nosingle approach to incubation. Researchers have performed several EM incubation studies, with results reflecting a diversity of practice. Typically, biomanufacturing sites either run selective monitoring sessions using single-incubation regimes with twodifferent culture media, or they leverage a dual-incubation system using two temperature ranges with a single agar plate transferred between them. The latter strategy involves some compromise over what types of microorganisms can be recovered (i). But that concern is balanced by cost savings and avoidance of crosscontamination risks that can arise from doubling the number of needed interventions, such as into the aseptic core of grade A environments. With both approaches, the rationale is that higher temperatures are required for bacterial recovery (e.g., 30-35 °C) than for recovery of fungi, which typically thrive at lower temperatures (e.g., 20-25 °C). In other cases, pharmaceutical manufacturers have used one incubation regime with one culture medium (2,3). At many facilities, the incubation regime practiced stems from historical preference, although some microbiology departments have sought to select an optimal regime based on experimentation.
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