The progressive increase of invasive disease and reports of resistance among Aspergillus species emphasizes the need for reproducible antifungal susceptibility testing. Inoculum standardization is a crucial step in such procedures. The objective of this study was to develop a fast and precise method of evaluating the cell density of an Aspergillus spore suspension, as an alternative to spectrometric readings or cell-counting with a haemocytometer. Densimat (bioMérieux) is a portable photometer that shows a good correlation with spectrometric readings and can advantageously replace the cumbersome, time-consuming method of cell-counting. Thus, Densimat brings significant improvement to the reproducibility and feasibility of standardization of a fungal inoculum.
Copyright 2004 SGM