Resazurin-based assay for screening bacteria for radiation sensitivity

Abstract

We report a simple and efficient colorimetric method to screen large numbers of bacterial strains for UV- and X-radiation sensitivity. We used reference radiation-sensitive and control strains of Escherichia coli K-12 to compare our colorimetric method to a standard clonogenic plating method. Our colorimetric method was as accurate as the standard method and was superior in terms of savings in supplies and man-hours. © 2013 Hudman and Sargentini.