“…Falkner and Gilles 1998;Joeris et al 2002), or indirect follow up via metabolic analysis, have been developed and evaluated, the radio-frequency impedance measurements system seems to be the most interesting. This superiority is because in the latter case, only the living cell number is measured, whereas for the other methods either the total cell number (Merten et al 1987) or the living cell number via sophisticated image analysis (Falkner and Gilles 1998;Joeris et al 2002) or an estimation of the metabolically active biomass are provided. The radio-frequency impedance measurement technique and its industrial applications are reviewed by Carvell and Dowd (in this issue).…”