Automated colony counting at Cambridge Antibody Technology saves hours with recombinant antibody selection
Synbiosis reports that biotech company Cambridge Antibody Technology (Cat) is using Protocol RGB and Acolyte automated colony counters.
Both systems are contributing to significant increases in productivity and accuracy at CAT, as well as substantial cost reductions.
Researchers at Cat are using the Acolyte and Protocol RGB as a rapid way of automating counts of phage display generated colonies on spiral plates.
Since both systems can count up to 1000 colonies in less than two seconds, while automatically correcting for background variations, they allow researchers to quickly make important decisions about whether to discard plates or continue with enrichments.
David Norton, Director of biochip systems at Cat explained: "We chose both types of colony counter because they could easily be integrated with a Wasp spiral plater.
We installed Acolyte as a cost-effective way of automating a total count.
The Protocol RGB is currently being used in the same way, but in future we would like to use it to automatically count and differentiate between blue and white plaques or colonies derived from LacZ selection vectors.
Therefore, we chose a Protocol RGB because it allows us the flexibility of counting and analysing coloured colonies." "Using automated colony counting has reduced the time it takes to make decisions about project progression from one hour to around five minutes.
This makes choosing which populations to pursue very clear, early on in the day, giving us plenty of time to continue with enrichments," adds Norton. Simon Johns, international product manager for Synbiosis commented: "We are very pleased to see the Protocol RGB and Acolyte being used by one of Europe's leading and most innovative biotech companies as a method of selecting high quality recombinant antibodies.
Their work shows the sheer versatility of both systems and proves that for counting recombinant colonies they can help save researchers considerable amounts of hands-on time."
