Synbiosis' system speeds up vaccine production
biological terrorism threats such as anthrax and smallpox has been
made easier by an automated colony counting system, which the
company claim, significantly improves vaccine testing time.
Colony counting and picking are well-recognised as one of the most error-prone and time consuming jobs in the lab. Companies are increasingly recognising and meeting the demand for automated high-throughput machines for laboratories that handle large sample volumes.
Synbiosis'is one such company. An integrated CCD camera and sortware, determines the size of reaction zones on single radial immunodiffusion (SRD) assay plates. This is a standard test to determine the potency of flu and other vaccines.
The ProtoCol allows the manual adjustment of contrast during an SRD assay. This is useful for when stains that differ in the depth of colour are used. The system's self-reading of each plate allows the researcher to inspect each plate, noting wells that are not perfectly circular.
The ProtoCol uses a system that allows the template to be overlayed, allowing a 16-well plate measured in less than a minute. Colonies as small as 0.5mm can be counted. This approach allows a possible capacity of 200-300 SRD plates to be read within a week.
Simon Johns, divisional manager for Synbiosis said: "The ProtoCOL system is now being applied widely. ProtoCOL shows pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines or antibiotics how much it could boost their productivity."
The ProtoCOL system is increasingly becoming adopted by the drug discovery community, having recently been taken up by the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, Loughry Campus, Northern Ireland to enumerate different coloured colonies of bacteria and guarantee food safety standards.
Genetix of the UK have a similar system in the form of the QPix2XT, which has been specifically designed for high-throughput genomics, as well as use in labs that have to handle a range of applications in protein and protein supply.
Genetix also offer another system, the MegaPix2, which has an ultra-high-throughput capacity.
