“…The current explosion in the use of FC in ecological studies has been in part fueled by the availability of new nuclear acid stains together with powerful, sensitive and relatively cheap benchtop flow cytometers. Few areas of research or few techniques have had such an amount of review papers and books in relatively few years: Darzynkiewicz and Crissman (1990), Ormerod (1994), Lloyd (1993), Fouchet et al (1993), Troussellier et al (1993), Methods in Cell Biology (1994), Shapiro (1995), Davey and Kell (1996), Porter et al (1997), Davey et al (1999), Collier and Campbell (1999), etc. However, and with the exception of the Trousellier et al (1993) paper, and small sections in the complete reviews of Davey and Kell (1996) and Collier and Campbell (1999), little has been published on the application of flow cytometry to natural planktonic bacteria, an area that has flourished after the papers of Li et al (1995), del Giorgio et al (1996) and Marie et al (1997) that independently realized the potential of the blue-light excitable stains marketed by Molecular Probes.…”