A study on the freezing storage of micro-organisms on human skin

In order to conduct a precise study on skinflora, a freezing procedure of micro-organisms obtained by scrubbing from human skin surface was investigated. The optimum conditions for the preservation and culture were determined by using standard strains of S. epidermidis and P. acnes which are typical skin micro-flora. Then the procedure was applied to evaluate actual human skin micro-organisms and counted the viable micro-organisms. The results showed; the viable counts and the ratio of the constituent species did not change during the freezing of one month. The scrubbing technic has a problem that we can not isolate micro-flora samples from a large number of persons within a short period of time, because of the viable counts of micro-organisms in each sample solution chang as time gose on. The procedure we presented here is useful to get precise data on the skin micro-bacterio-logical study.