ABSTRACT
Two vital functions in pharmaceutical microbiology are the enumeration and identification of micro-organisms found in products and the manufacturing environment. The techniques currently used to carry out these tasks are firmly rooted in the past. Methods widely used in the industry today for microbial enumeration include pour plating, spread plating, most probable number (MPN) and the Miles and Misra technique (see Chapter 4). Commonly used methods of identification include visual inspection of colonial morphology, agglutination tests, selective differential agars and biochemical evaluation. Many of these methods would be familiar to the founding fathers of microbiology such as Pasteur, Koch and Petri who worked in the latter part of the 19th century.
