Spectrophotometric vs. colorimetric analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis population growth curves in resazurin assay

摘要

The rezazurin assay for screening of bacterial growth remains the most popular method for express diagnostictests. It is based on the change of colour and uorescence properties of the respective dye due to bacterialbreathing but its conventional quantitative practical implementation requires a relative expensive and cumbersomespectrophotometric equipment. As an alternative approach, we propose to shift a focus from hardware tosoftware. Preliminary results announced in this work show that the processing RGB colour channels for simplephotographic images of resazurin assay plates with Mycobacterium tuberculosis provides an opportunity toreconstruct the target growth curve with an accuracy comparable with results obtained using the conventionalphotometric uorescence curves.