FIG 3.

Distribution of recovered and nonrecovered microorganisms from the polymicrobial suspensions by the manual and automated methods. The histogram presents the numbers of bacterial types recovered (0) and nonrecovered (1, 2, or 3 bacterial types per suspension) for the 48 replicates (M, manual method; I, instrument). The table details the bacterial concentration for the recovered (0) and nonrecovered bacterial types. A total of 49 bacterial types from the 16 polymicrobial suspensions with 2 to 4 distinct bacterial types were tested in triplicate, corresponding to a total of 147 distinct bacterial types to be recovered from the 48 plate cultures.