What is ATP?
Atp is Adenosine Triphosphate molecule produced by all living cells, and is used to store or free energy for intra-cellular or extra-cellular reactions.
When cells are dying and their membranes are degrading, Atp is released from the cell
Intra-cellular Atp production if detected, should confirm that cells present in the sample were still alive.
How do we detect ATP?
Limitations of classic ATPbioluminescence technologies:
- Bacterial ATP is not discriminated from total ATP
- Non bacterial ATP exceeds largely bacterial ATP values:
- ATp on only one skin cell, pollen or micro-algae > 1000 bacteria
- triggers unnecessarily false positives (false alerts)
- is therefore not correlated to sensitive plate count mtehods
no flushing of inhibiting substances before detecting Atp
Bioluminescence reaction is reduced even destroyed by inhibiting substances present in samples
- bioluminescen signal reduced > 90% (Velasquez et al, 1997)
false negatives: quenched reaction let user believe that sample is with low bacteria count
Inhibiting factor unpredictable from one environmental sample to the next one:
- number and concentration of unidentified inhibiting substances varies from sample to sample
- Low volume sampled by swabbing (0.1ml sampled is not representative of the bacterial population present in liquids)
For Atpbioluminescence detection tools to be correlated to sensitive plate count methods or rapid viable bacteria detection methods :
- there must be a preliminary flushing of inhibiting substances present in the samples
- a selective non-bacterial ATP extraction and flushing
- flushing free Atp present in the sample
- selective bacterial ATP and its detection by bioluminescence
- to be able to reactive bacterial spores prior to its detection
To reply to these needs a world patented solution exists :
PROFILE-1 is the only quantitative bacterial Atpbioluminescence diagnostic test kit:
- correlated with sensitive plate count methods and published in world-reputed scientific paper
- not influenced by quenching substances through a patented flushing system
- discriminating bacterial Atp from non-microbial ATP
- detecting also bacteria spores (with an inventive reactivation protocol).