AUTOMATION OF BACTERIAL COLONY COUNTING USING CIS SCANNER AND IMAGE PROCESSING

Background and Aim:Although it seems simple, bacteria colony counting is still the critical primary step of most of the microbiologic researches and technologies which is laborious and time consuming. Herein, we aimed to introduce a simple and fast protocol for colony counting using Contact Image Scanner (CIS).Methods:Lactibacillus Paracasei strain TD3 was cultured in de Man Rogosa Sharpe (MRS) broth medium and then was subjected to agar plating following making serial dilution up to 9 times. Imaging of appeared bacterial colonies was performed using Contact Image Scanner (CIS) and the picked up images were compared to Android cellphone Charged Coupled Device (CCD) results. Moreover, obtained quantitative data from all the three processes have been modified with our developed modified imaging software.Results:The obtained images by CIS through our suggested protocol had demonstrated considerably higher quality than CCD and Andriod images in determining the exact number of bacterial colony. Besides, suggested protocol was able to take the two dimensional pictures and high quality cross sections from bacterial colony counts in a fraction of seconds.Conclusion:In the present study, it was demonstrated that using CIS though suggested protocol not only could achieved best quality colony counting images but also it was considerably cheaper and faster than traditional methods as well as CCDs.

Keywords:

Contact Image Scanner (CIS) , bacterial colony counting , software