Viable bacterial cell detections are very important for analyzing bacteria contamination in food or evaluating the cleanliness of facilities in order to protect us from food poisoning and infections. Bacterial cell detections are also used for the screening of sanitizing agents and drug resistance detections. Generally, counting the number of colonies on an agar plate is the standard method for determining the number of viable bacterial cells in samples. However, colony formations require one to several days. Dojindo’s Microbial Viability Assay Kit-WST can be used to determine the number of viable bacterial cells in a sample by a colorimetric method and can be applied to 96-well microplate assays. The electron mediator in the kit receives electrons from viable bacterial cells and transfers the electrones to WST, one of the water-soluble tetrazolium salts developed by Dojindo. Bacterial cell viability then can be determined by monitoring the color intensity of WST formazan dye. Since several types of media used for bacterial cell cultures and components do not interfere with the assay(Fig. 5), simply add the assay solution and incubate for one to several hours to determine the initial number of viable bacterial cells in the sample(Fig. 2). This assay kit was co-developed with the Biotechnology and Food Research Institute, Fukuoka Industrial Technology Center.