Fig. 8.

Benzyl alcohol pretreatment improves cell survival against an antiseptic detergent. Viability of M. smegmatis after treating with increasing concentrations of BTC or SDS. Prior to the detergent treatment, cells were subjected to no treatment (blue circle), 5-min benzyl alcohol treatment and washout (red square), or 60-min benzyl alcohol treatment and washout (green triangle). The experiment was done in quadruplicate. ∗P = 0.0422. ∗∗P = 0.0049 (no detergent) or 0.0066 (25 μg/ml BTC) by Kruskal-Wallis test followed by Dunn's multiple comparison test. In the absence of BTC or SDS challenges, the CFU showed a statistically significant increase upon treating cells with benzyl alcohol. We speculate that benzyl alcohol may help dispersing clumped cells, resulting in a small but consistent increase in CFU. BA, benzyl alcohol; BTC, benzethonium chloride; CFU, colony-forming unit; SDS, sodium dodecyl sulfate.