Hundreds of plates per hour throughput from dedicated inhibition zone reader system, promising the fastest antibiotic susceptibility testing available
Synbiosis, a manufacturer of automated microbiological systems, has announced that a new version of Protozone, its award-winning, dedicated inhibition zone reader is now available.
The system saves valuable laboratory time by automatically measuring zones to produce accurate antibiotic susceptibility testing results in seconds.
Protozone features a completely integrated system, including powerful PC technology and a CCD camera to analyse sample plates containing antibiotic disks and their related inhibition zones.
At the click of a button, the software sizes the zones around each disk to generate accurate results.
A high-resolution plate image is displayed for each plate, with susceptibility flags displayed next to the measured zones.
For a 9cm plate, Protozone can read, display, and store zone measurements from six disks in under two seconds, claimed to be more than ten times faster than any other reader currently available.
The system's unique software can work with a wide range of agar types including difficult-to-see zones on blood agar.
Since it is dedicated to reading inhibition zones, Protozone is very competitively priced.
Results are automatically stored and users can opt to save plate images for independent auditing at a later date.
Simon Johns, international product manager for Synbiosis said: "We believe anyone measuring susceptibility zones will benefit from using the new Protozone. Also, because it is the fastest, dedicated zone reader on the market today, it can easily achieve throughputs of hundreds of plates per hour.
It will allow clinical laboratories to complete all such activities in a fraction of the time taken for manual methods, greatly increasing laboratory efficiency."
