Title: Microbiological CRMs: LENTICULE® discs and VITROIDS™ Fast, reliable and easy to use

Abstract:

Characterized authenticated quantitative reference materials are mandatory to ensure that water, food and environmental microbiological laboratory samples as well as prepared culture media (according to EN ISO 11133:2014+Amd1:2018) are of acceptable quality for safe use and comply with relevant legislation or guidelines. Unfortunately, the use of freeze-dried microbiology control strains in order to ensure an acceptable sample / media quality is very time-consuming and expensive. Thus, ready to use microbiological certified reference materials (CRM) reduce such costs, hands-on time and possible error sources.

To determine this incurred costs / time savings, a comparison between freeze-dried microbiology control strains and ready-to-use microbiological CRMs for different media performance testing methods (pour plate method, membrane filtration and spread plate method) were carried out. The results were evaluated whether use of CRMs is worthwhile for laboratories in their day-to-day work.

The comparison shows that hands-on time can be reduced from averagely 65 minutes (over three days) to 6 minutes per control strain by utilizing the above mentioned ready-to-use microbiological CRMs. These reference materials consist of pure bacterial/fungal cultures in a solid water-soluble matrix, which conserves them in a viable state. The time savings are achieved by reducing the time spent preparing stock cultures, recovering banked stocks and performing pre-enrichment steps. The elimination of the pre-enrichment steps additionally decreases the probability of contaminations.

In conclusion, microbiological certified reference materials provide tools for the laboratories to save significant time, to reduce overall expenditure and to avoid errors or contaminations.

Biography:

Mathias Baeumlisberger finished his Doctoral thesis at the University Medical Centre Freiburg at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (Germany) in 2016 and then started working for the Merck KGaA/Sigma-Aldrich Production GmbH in Buchs Switzerland. He is Senior Scientist in the R&D Reference Materials & Proficiency Testing department.