ABSTRACT
Microbiology has long relied on traditional methods for measuring the numbers of bacteria present in any given sample. Preeminent in the development of the subject has been the plate count, whereby it is assumed that a viable cell exposed to the appropriate solid agar medium will, by rounds of growth and division, give rise to a single colony. Each colony is presumed to have arisen from a single cell; therefore, enumeration of the numbers of colonies that grow from suitably diluted samples gives the total numbers of viable cells in the original material. However, this principle, which is handed down to succeeding generations of microbiologists, is probably a gross oversimplification that has arisen largely as a result of the dominance of laboratory-based studies that employ rich growth media and ideal culture conditions. Such cultures yield cells that may be grossly different, both morphologically and biochemically, from those found in their natural environments. Several workers have remarked oh the freakish nature of laboratory-grown cells that results in the growth of what can be viewed as giant cells, compared with those found in their natural habitats [35,47].
