Safety , efficacy and utility of methods of transferring adhesive and cohesive cells to microplates to avoid Escherichia coli aerosols

The virtual colony count (VCC) microbiological assay has been utilized for over a decade to measure the antimicrobial activity of peptides such as defensins and LL-37 against biosafety level (BSL)-1 and BSL-2 bacteria including , , , and Escherichia coli Staphylococcus aureus Bacillus cereus Enterobacter . In addition, a modified pipetting technique was presented in a 2011 aerogenes study of defensin activity against the BSL-3 pathogen . Both Bacillus anthracis studies were published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Here we report that the method can also detect cross-contamination caused by aerosols utilizing the VCC method of data analysis by quantitative growth kinetics (QGK). The QGK threshold time, or T , equivalent to the cycle time C reported in 1996 by Heid et al., precisely identifies when wells were inoculated. Bryan Ericksen ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] Ericksen B. How to cite this article: Safety, efficacy and utility of methods of transferring adhesive and cohesive cells Escherichia coli 2014, :267 (doi: to microplates to avoid aerosols [version 1; referees: 1 approved, 1 not approved] F1000Research 3 ) 10.12688/f1000research.5659.1 © 2014 Ericksen B. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the , which Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution Licence permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Data associated with the article are available under the terms of the (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication). Creative Commons Zero "No rights reserved" data waiver I thank Peprotech, Inc. for funding. Grant information: The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. 06 Nov 2014, :267 (doi: ) First published: 3 10.12688/f1000research.5659.1 Referee Status: