[Laboratory-based evaluation of a selective X-SA agar medium supplemented with chromogenic substrate for...

The newly developed culture medium, X-SA agar medium (Nissui Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., Tokyo) selective for Staphylococcus aureus was evaluated for its ability to detect clinical isolates of S. aureus. Besides S. aureus, X-SA agar media allowed the growth of coagulase-negative staphylococci, Bacillus cereus and some isolates of corynebacteria. However, those species were easily distinguishable from the blue and convex colonies of S. aureus. When compared to the traditional egg yolk mannitol salt agar, selectivity for the species other than S. aureus was more specific, and growth support for S. aureus was more comparable to sheep blood agar. Also, when various phenotypic variants of S. aureus were inoculated, visible colonies of mucoid colony variants and attenuated growth variants on Mueller-Hinton agar appeared on X-SA agar plates after 24 hour-incubation, but it required 48 hour-incubation for small colony variants. The fully automated microbiology system, RAISUS (Nissui Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.) gave comparable species-identification and antimicrobial susceptibility test results when cell suspension directly prepared from X-SA agar media was tested. However, species-identification for phenotypic variants of S. aureus was more complicated for RAISUS testing and detection of coagulase. With these results, it could be concluded that the X-SA agar medium supplemented with chromogenic substrate is superior to the traditional selective media for the detection of S. aureus, and is widely applicable for clinical microbiology as well as food microbiology.