It is important to monitor and assess the growth of micro-organisms under various conditions. Yet, thus far there has been no technique to do this with the required speed and accuracy. This work demonstrates swift and accurate assessment of the concentration of carbon dioxide that is produced by use of a wavelength-modulated tunable diode-laser based absorption spectroscopy (WM-TDLAS). It is shown by experiments on two types of bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans, that the technique can produce high signal-to-noise-ratio data from bacteria grown in confined spaces and exposed to limited amounts of nutrients that can be used for extraction of growth parameters by fitting of the Gompertz model. By applying the technique to S. aureus bacteria at various temperatures (in the 25°C to 42°C range), it is specifically shown that both the maximum growth rate and the so-called lag time have a strong temperature dependence (under the specific conditions with a maximum of the former at 37°C) that matches conventional models well for bacterial growth. Hence, it is demonstrated that WM-TDLAS monitoring CO₂ is a user-friendly, non-intrusive, and label-free technique that swiftly, and with high signal-to-noise-ratio, can be used for rapid (on the Hz scale) and accurate assessment of bacterial growth.

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The objective of this work was to attain essential parameters by using a Gompertz model that employed a new approach of wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS) to describe the microorganism growth. The measurement method of WMS introduces noninvasive technique instead of complicated invasive microorganism operation analysis and quickly obtains the accurate real-time measurement results. By using the WMS measurement, the specific growth curve of microorganism growth clearly displayed every three minute, which has characteristics of high sensitivity, high spectral resolution, fast time response and overcomes the randomness and error operation of traditional analysis methods. The measurement value of BF and AF in the range of 1.008 to 1.043 and the lower MSE showed that Gompertz model can fit the data well and be capable of describing bacteria growth rate and lag time. The results of experiment data suggested that the specific growth rate of microorganism depends on the temperature. With the increase of temperature ranging from 25 o C to 42 o C , the lag time of bacteria growth has been shortened. And the suitable temperature of bacteria growth is about 37 o C . Judging from the growth rate of microorganisms, we can identify the microbial species, not only to improve the precision and efficiency, but also to provides a rapidly sensitive way for microbial detection. The lag time of microorganism growth also provides a great application prospect for shelf life of the food safety.