[The differentiation of clostridial microcultures on nuclepore-filters by fluorescent antibodies as a rapid screening test for spores. I. Method of producing microcultures (author's transl)].

Spores of 32 strains of 11 different clostridial species (Table 1) were allowed to germinate as microcultures on Nuclepore membrane-filters to ascertain whether they could be differentiated according to their patterns of growth. The questions dealt with in the preliminary studies, investigated which pore-size of filters would be best for this purpose and which time necessary for each species to produce microcolonies of 10 to 20 cells from a single spore. Nuclepore-filters with a pore-diameter of 1 mu gave the best results and the times for producing microcolonies of the desired size ranged from 4 hours with Cl. septicum up to 10 hours with Cl. tetani (Table 3). The final result of the study was, that the differences in the patterns of growth were not great enough to allow identification. Only Cl. perfringens formed specific and distinctive compact colonies (Tables 4 and 5).