The cultivation of sulfate-reducing bacteria on agar plates is a somewhat involved and time-consuming process. This is partly due to the requirement for fairly strict anaerobic conditions but mainly because of the length of the incubation period which may vary from 6 days to weeks with the resulting delay of the required information.
The work reported herein was undertaken in an attempt to apply the advantageous features of the membrane filter method to the detection of anaerobic organisms. As originally developed, the membrane filter (Goetz and Tsuneishi, 1951; Clark et al., 1951) permits the recovery of small numbers of organisms from large volumes of water and the rapid cultivation of many aerobic bacteria. The ultimate purpose was to develop a method which would not require more complex manipulation than the membrane procedure according to Standard Methods for the Examination of Water, Sewage, and Industrial Wastes (A.P.H.A. 1955) and to reduce the incubation period for anaerobic bacteria
