Microbiology 9th Edition by Laura Black, Jacquelyn Black

Exercise 35

Suppose you spilled two cultures of Salmonella typhimur ium (each containing 100,000 cells) on your lab bench. You im mediately applied the same disinfectant to both cultures at the same time. One culture had been freshly grown for 36 hours and the other culture is 2 weeks old. If the kill ing rate of the disin fectant is 90% per minute, do you think that microbes in both cultures will be completely killed after 6 minutes? Why or why not?