How do I differentiate dead and alive cells?

Track the growth of your culture to tell live cells from dead cells.

Live cells grow

The best way to know if a culture is alive is to track its growth. A growing cell is an alive cell.

Of course this means tracking cell growth over time. In other words, it doesn't apply to a single sample.

BactoBox® (using BacTotal) counts every whole cell in a sample

Examples:

• A whole cell that has stopped dividing counts towards cells/mL
• A whole cell that no longer forms a colony counts towards cells/mL
• A whole cell that takes up propidium iodide counts towards cells/mL

The one thing that removes a cell from the cells/mL count is full lysis. Because a cell that has come apart is no longer there.

Legacy approach via gating

In the past, we offered custom gating settings to differentiate dead and alive cells. While this worked in some use cases, the approach is too brittle for general use. There are simply too many combinations of bacterial species, sample preparation, media types, culture conditions, etc.

Advanced feature 🧩

This is an advanced feature. We only support advanced features through a custom solution. Contact SBT for details.