Software discriminates colony sizes in seconds

Synbiosis, manufacturer of automated colony counters, has launched a powerful new feature to its colony sizing software. This allows microbiologists to automatically distinguish colonies according to their size and group colonies into user definable size classes.

This will help microbiologists to identify bacteria or carry out QC of, for example, growth media, incubators or spiral platers.

The new feature, which now comes as standard with all Synbiosis's Protocol range of automated colony counters can be used to automatically view, live on screen each plate alongside a histogram of colony size distribution.

These images and histograms can be stored to allow comparison from one month to the next and are useful for measuring such parameters as the viability of a bacterial control strain.

Multiple histograms can be viewed alongside each other to provide direct comparison of replicate samples or isolated samples taken at different times. The information can also be exported as text files for publication use or to packages such as Excel for more detailed analysis work.

With the Protocol XR, the software has been adapted to show images of distinct colony sizes in different colours on a single image.

This combined with the system's ability to accurately measure colonies as small as 0.1mm, makes it ideal for food or environmental microbiologists who need to identify unknown bacteria by size.

Simon Johns, international product specialist for Synbiosis stated: " We are confident that our powerful, new size discrimination software used with a Protocol system will benefit a large number of quality control and bacterial identification applications.

Where users are manually measuring the size of thousands of colonies every day, it will save countless hours as well as improve the quality of operating procedures and results, making it essential for microbiology laboratories."