Comparison of methods

THE REQUIREMENT of some brucellae, pneumococci and gonococci for carbon dioxide is well established. A strain of Staphylococcus aureus dependent on C02 for characteristic growth was first recorded by Hale (1951) and subse-quently there have been other reports of staphylococci with similar require-ments (Thomas, 1977). This is a feature not usually associated with members of the Enterobacteriacae; however, we reported strains of Klebsiella that needed C 0 2 for growth (Barker, Brookes and Johnson, 1978) and a strain of Escherichia coli with this requirement was described by Eykyn and Phillips (1978). This paper describes the growth of a variety of Klebsiellae in air with added C02 and its relevance to the isolation and recognition of these organisms in the laboratory