System provides biochemical fingerprints of bacterial isolates, in either pure or mixed culture, providing a rapid, low cost alternative to gel-electrophoresis techniques
Don Whitley Scientific's PhenePlate bacterial typing system is proving extremely successful for rapid characterisation of E.coli strains.
In an extensive study looking at the intestinal microbiota of pigs, the innovative system clearly differentiated individual strains at the sub-species level after only seven hours incubation.
The easy to use PhenePlate system provides biochemical fingerprints of bacterial isolates, in either pure or mixed culture.
Based on a 96 well microplate format, the tests are simple to perform and produce accurate, reliable results without the need for expensive equipment.
Specific PhenePlates are available for various bacterial groups and there is a choice of high resolution or rapid screening plates.
In this study the rapid screening plate, with 12 substrates per sample, allowed eight strains to be studied on each plate and clearly differentiated them at the subspecies level.
Utilising a low cost scanner and dedicated PC software, PhenePlate provides a rapid, low cost alternative to gel-electrophoresis techniques.
An inexpensive transparency scanner or microplate reader provides automated reading and the novel software reads the colour of each microplate directly from the scanned image.
Bacterial typing data can be rapidly accumulated making the system ideal for epidemiological, nosocomial or ecological investigations.
