LED arrays can help detect colonies on even the most difficult to visualise agar plates, speeding up detection times
Synbiosis, a manufacturer of automated microbiological systems, has fitted new LED arrays to its Acolyte automated colony counter.
These can help detect colonies on even the most difficult to visualise agar plates and could provide vital time in an outbreak situation.
Acolyte, designed as an automated alternative to traditional manual counting has two arrays of LEDs allowing incident, transmitted and dark field illumination.
These will benefit microbiologists needing to accurately count colonies on dark media such as blood agar or on unevenly poured plates.
A further benefit of using LEDs is their inherent long-life expectancy and high quality illumination performance.
The compact Acolyte has software with an innovative web-styled user interface, which generates live, full colour images that can be saved and printed to create professional reports.
Synbiosis offers two levels of functionality with Acolyte, click'n'count and supercount.
Using click'n'count, counting involves pointing at a colony and clicking, a process as fast as any light box counter but without the time consuming and error prone keying in steps.
For enumeration around 100 times faster than a manual count, supercount is available.
With supercount, at the touch of a button, Acolyte automatically corrects for background variations and different media types, while it counts up to 500 colonies per second.
Simon Johns, International Product Manager for Synbiosis commented: "Acolyte's LED arrays extend the range of applications of this cost-effective system.
In conjunction with superCount, Acolyte's arrays could save up to 90 per cent of a microbiologist's manual counting time.
In an outbreak situation such as the recent one in the UK where over 130 people contracted Legionella, enumerating pathogenic bacteria quickly is crucial in helping identify patients who have a serious infection and could prove the difference between life and death."
