Abstract
Various kinds of methods are available in the study of bacteria in environments, but most of them rely on cultivation, which leads to difficulty in the research on nonculturable bacteria dominated in aquatic environments. We applied flow cytometer to analyze bacterial sizes and nucleic acid contents. We could distinguish E. coil from Bacillus megaterium on the strength of their forward scatter and measured their DNA contents by fluorescence signals. Flow cytometric analysis of natural bacterial population in river water exhibited that we could detect bacteria smaller than E, coli, and the diversity of bacterial size reflected the pollution level in the aquatic environment.
