Several studies demonstrated that surfactants are toxic for the
cell and produce a release of ions, making conductometry a potential
tool to screen this effect due to the treatment of cells with
these agents [40,42–46]. As a matter of fact, several biocides impair
the semipermeability of the cell envelope, suggesting that the use
of automatic conductometry can be extended to other compounds,
paving the way to a general use of this technique as a preliminary
analysis to study cell toxic effects. In this picture, the proposed
method has the advantage of allowing to process several samples
within one working day, to be inexpensive as for the consumables
and to give a very high resolution in terms of compound
concentration.