Bacterial Counts in Spleen

Abstract

Bacterial loads can be determined as colony forming units (CFU) at any point of the infection by culturing spleen homogenates on agar plates. This is a reliable method for comparing the kinetics of infection in various mouse strains, estimating the virulence of different bacterial mutants or isolates and for vaccine testing and vacine estandarization. Although this method has been designed to recover Brucella or Salmonella organisms from spleen, the procedure may be applicable for other bacteria such as Listeria and Mycobacterium as well as to count bacterial loads in other organs such as liver or lymph nodes.