The principal idea of retrieving information about the abilities of an organism and its special modes of action when making use of certain energy sources can be equivalently applied to other macro-nutrients such as nitrogen, sulfur, or phosphorus and their compounds and derivatives.
As an extension, the impact of auxotrophic supplements or antibiotics, heavy metals or other inhibitory compounds on the respiration behaviour of the cells can be determined.
In contrast to bacterial growth curves, there is typically no death phase in PMs, as the reduced tetrazolium dye is insoluble.
Proprietary and commercially available software is available that provides a solution for storage, retrieval, and analysis of high throughput phenotype data.
A powerful free and open source software is the "opm" package based on R.[8][9] "opm" contains tools for analyzing PM data including management, visualization and statistical analysis of PM data, covering curve-parameter estimation, dedicated and customizable plots, metadata management, statistical comparison with genome and pathway annotations, automatic generation of taxonomic reports, data discretization for phylogenetic software and export in the YAML markup language.