Abstract

Objective: The manual counting of gram stained bacteria examined under a microscope becomes difficult when a large number of bacterial cells exist in a microscopic field. The present study was aimed to ease this problem by applying ImageJ software to counting of gram stained bacteria.

Method: This experiment was conducted on Elmergib university, faculty of pharmacy laboratories (Al-Khoms city- Libya). In this study, a microscopic image of a gram stained bacterial cells captured using a student’s smartphone, treated and the bacterial cells were then easily and automatically counted using ImageJ.

Results: According to ImageJ reading, the total number of bacterial particles appeared in the field of a microscopic image were 332 cells.

Conclusion: Direct staining and visualization of organisms for counting can benefit greatly from the use of ImageJ software. This method is less expensive, less contamination and less laborious than other methods and is more rapid and reproducible than counting using manual microscopy methods.

Keywords: ImageJ, Bacterial cells, Automated cell counting