All rabbits challenged with the low inoculum of LAC (n = 19) or LACΔpvl (n = 19), including the animals used in the preliminary inoculum-ranging experiments, were used for macroscopic and microbiological evaluation.
In order to prepare the inoculum, the preliminary cultures were brought to identical optical density A = 0.2 ± 0.05.
At most, this represents a 15-fold lower cell number than the inoculum used in preliminary experiments.
Sediment collected during the first event provided the inoculum for a preliminary microcosm experiment conducted with 3-CB, whereas the inoculum used in mesocosm-scale experiments involving 2-CP or 3-CB was derived from sediment collected nearly 2 years later.
It should be realized that the results obtained for blood samples with the new method should be considered preliminary until the purity of inoculum has been verified by subculture.
In fact, preliminary experiments showed that intra-peritoneal inoculum of PBS decreased significantly LPS toxicity when administered at shorter times before LPS (data not shown).
Inoculation was as described in [ 17], except that in preliminary experiments we found that a higher inoculum was needed to obtain reproducible disease development on both ecotypes, and so used 5 μl of a 6 × 106 spore/ml suspension (3 × 104 conidia per drop) throughout this study.
28 Preliminary bacterial growth curves aided in standardizing the inoculum, time of incubation, and growth medium necessary to achieve a target inoculum of 3.0×10 colony-forming units/mL of live bacteria in the early log phase of growth.
Preliminary experiments to ferment FOW without addition of any inoculum indicated that the population of LAB present in the FOW grew to a maximum of up to 6.61 ± 0.5 log CFU/g during fermentation, which alone was inadequate to carry out fermentation to a desirable end point.
Preliminary experiments showed that pH, temperature, and the amount of inoculum are the most significant variables affecting efficiency of effluent pre-treatment (Ye et al. 2014).
In preliminary studies, we observed that the bacterial concentration used as inoculum or the choice of the time point for the output have no effect on the CI value (data not shown).
