Quality Control of Solid Culture Media: A Comparison of the Classic and the So‐called Ecometric Technique

摘要

Some selective culture media, prepared from commercially available dried preparations function poorly, and the same applies to an occasional non‐selective culture medium. This calls for systematic monitoring of media before they are used in actual diagnostic work. Classic plating or dilution‐to‐extinction techniques are often found too cumbersome. Hence a simple streaking technique (‘ecometric’ evaluation) was developed earlier for this purpose. It was subsequently simplified further and its accuracy and precision were assessed in this study.After it had been found that the simplified ecometric procedure allowed a reasonably accurate analysis of the selective and productive properties of media, it was used to evaluate 16 selective media, currently used in food microbiology. Results obtained agreed well with observations on the functioning made during routine examination of various foods. Finally an attempt was made to assess whether ecographic inoculation would allow the study of micro‐organisms under repressive conditions, particularly refrigeration temperature. It appeared that this was inde