Rapid Live Bacteria Counter Using Cassette-Type Flow Cytometry

We developed the rapid live bacteria counter (RLBC) with the disposable cassette to count live bacteria rapidly, simply and accurately for the food security. The RLBC has the following features: (1) The RLBC performs automatically following processes in the cassette: removing residues, staining live and dead bacteria and counting live bacteria by flow cytometry techniques. (2) This uses the multi staining to distinguish easily the fluorescence of live bacteria from the different fluorescence of foreign substances. (3)For accurate counting and the cassette breakage prevention , the micro flow-cell for the flow cytometry satisfies following conditions that the coincidence loss of live bacteria is below 0.05 and the pressure drop is below 1×105 Pa. The live bacteria count obtained with the RLBC and the classical cultural method for the test samples are highly correlated (R2 (E-Coli) = 0.97, R2 (Spinach) = 0.96, R2 (Carrot) = 0.91, R2 (Red cabbage) = 0.90).