Easygel is the agar replacement that takes the work out of microbiology.
Autoclaves and water baths are expensive to purchase and maintain. Preparing a daily supply of agar means a tremendous investment not only of time and labor, but energy as well. And the truth is, the agar method has numerous hidden costs which make it more expensive than it may seem at first glance.
Easygel is a pectin-gel method which comes as a sterile 2-part test unit consisting of a bottle of liquid medium and a petri dish that is pretreated with a special formulation. Here's how it works: When the bottle of liquid medium is poured in to the pretreated petri dish, ions diffuse from the pretreatment layer into the liquid causing it to gel. Complete gelling takes around 40 minutes. The result is an instant, hassle-free petri dish: where you want it, when you want it.
Adding inoculum is done by a variety of simple methods (pour plate, streak plate or membrane filter). With Esygel, you spend less time preparing and more time performing.
Coliscan Easygel is ideal when aa sample size of 1-5 mL is appropriate, such as the testing of river water or other samples where there is generally a sizable population of coliforms and/or E. coli. The sample can be added directly into the bottle of Coliscan Easygel, swirled, poured into a pretreated petri dish and incubated. Incubation temperature is not critical, and under warm conditions (32-37° C) the results can be read in 24-28 hours. Count all the purple colonies on the Coliscan dish (disregard any light blue, blue-green or white colonies) as E. coli and magenta (pink) colonies as colifroms.