Title: Microbiological CRMs: LENTICULE discs and VITROIDS Fast, reliable and easy to use

Abstract:

Characterized authenticated quantitative reference materials are mandatory to ensure that water, food and environmental microbiological laboratory samples as well as prepared culture media (according to EN ISO 11133:2014+Amd1:2018) are of acceptable quality for safe use and comply with relevant legislation or guidelines. Unfortunately, the use of freeze-dried microbiology control strains in order to ensure an acceptable sample / media quality is very time-consuming and expensive. Thus, ready to use microbiological certified reference materials (CRM) reduce such costs, hands-on time and possible error sources.

To determine this incurred costs / time savings, a comparison between freeze-dried microbiology control strains and ready-to-use microbiological CRMs for different media performance testing methods (pour plate method, membrane filtration and spread plate method) were carried out. The results were evaluated whether use of CRMs is worthwhile for laboratories in their day-to-day work.

Biography:

Mathias Baeumlisberger finished his Doctoral thesis at the University Medical Centre Freiburg at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (Germany) in 2016 and then started working for the Merck KGaA/Sigma-Aldrich Production GmbH in Buchs Switzerland. He is Senior Scientist in the R&D Reference Materials & Proficiency Testing department.