Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The book begins with a decent 6 page chapter on the "Initial Stages to the Identification of a Bacterial Culture," then has a condensed version of Bergey's manual, which theoretically could allow identification to the species level, provided the information is correct and complete. I got this book yesterday, and found an error on the first thing I looked up. (in table 7.1 - Streptomyces does produce aerial hyphae.)
A quarter of the book is "The Atlas Concept," in which a map of bacterial genera is shown, organized so that "the countries are families and the cities are genera." This atlas is then repeated thirty or forty times with shaded areas to show gram stain reaction, aerobicity, morphology, flagellation,catalase reaction, oxidase reaction, pigmentation, various biochemical reactions, etc. This may be somewhat useful, but in my opinion, not worth buying the book for.
Approximately 20% of the book is useless unless you use the author's commercial BART (TM) identification system, which it appears is only used to identify iron-related, sulfate reducing, and slime forming bacteria. If using the BART system, this book may be worthwhile, although one would think that the package inserts for the BART system would contain the same information.
Overall, I'd say get a introductory microbiology lab manual if you need to know how to read gram stains, determine aerobicity, and do biochemical testing, and use Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology for your identifications.
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Biologists and zoologists have the luxury of being readily able to view, touch, measure and observe the life cycles of their organisms of interest without great difficulty. For bacteriologists such tangible examinations are denied. Only recently has it become possible to build up an understanding of the nature of these communities of bacteria.
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