Flow cytometry has been used extensively as a clinical diagnostic tool, in pharmaceutical development, and in basic medical research since its development in the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years, it has increasingly been applied in the food and dietary supplement industries, particularly for the enumeration of probiotics.
The traditional method of enumerating bacteria is the plate count method, in which the bacteria are grown on media. However, there are some drawbacks to this method. It takes t…