New device is so effective it can detect and count thermotolerant coliforms and E coli in water in just under ten hours: half the time it would take with any other plate based method
Synbiosis, a manufacturer of automated microbiological systems, says that its strategic alliance with Colifast has resulted in the Colifast Rapid Microcolony Counter (CRMC), a new UV-based colony counter.
This will benefit microbiologists wanting a rapid, automated method of counting fluorescent colonies sampled from potentially contaminated water or meat.
The CRMC, developed from Synbiosis's innovative ProtoCol colony counter, includes an integrated high-resolution camera and UV light source plus powerful colony counting software.
This simple to programme system can detect any fluorescent colonies on fluorogenic agar and, at the touch of a button, will automatically count those with a diameter as small as 200µm.
The ability to enumerate such tiny colonies means plates can be read after very short incubation times.
James Berg, business and application development manager at Colifast, explained: "We chose the ProtoCol system as the basis for building the CRMC because it is the dominant player in the automated colony counting market. Synbiosis is also very technically competent and was extremely cooperative in helping us to design and assemble the system from the ProtoCol." Dr Berg continued: "As to the applications of the CRMC, they are limitless.
However, we have been actively using it as part of a new rapid water contamination test and are presenting our results soon in a paper published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Our studies show it is so effective it can detect and count thermotolerant coliforms and E coli in water in just under ten hours, which is half the time it would take with any other plate based method.
We've also embarked on an AOAC validation project, which is scheduled for completion in the next quarter of 2002." Simon Johns, international product manager for Synbiosis, added: "Many of Colifast's customers had demanded a method of enumerating fluorescent bacteria on solid agar, and there was no colony counter available that could do this.
The CRMC developed from our alliance now looks set to become a useful tool for detecting coliforms in water.
In addition, because it can detect bacteria after such short incubation times it has the potential to be used as part of an early warning system for much more hazardous bacterial contamination."
