4.3 Incubation of bacterial cultures

The incubation of primary cultures has one aim: to obtain a bacterial growth resulting in a visible bacterial population.

Some species will grow better than others, and some will not grow at all. Incubation conditions are used so that they best support the growth of:

• the target bacteria
• a range of other bacteria present in the specimen.

The main parameters are atmosphere, temperature and duration of incubation.

Parallel culture with different sets of media, sometimes incubated under different conditions, is used when the target bacteria have different growth requirements. This has a significant increase in workload and costs.