Speed Up Your Colony Counting: Unique system automatically identifies colony type and count

No more time-consuming counting by hand 

Regular colony counts are part of the day-to-day tasks of many laboratories in order to rule out the contamination of products with bacteria, viruses, yeasts, or moulds during production. To do this, Petri dishes containing the relevant samples are evaluated in order to determine the number of colonies formed. While the classic manual counting method means that every single colony has to be marked individually, automatic devices can analyse numerous Petri dishes of the same type very quickly. However, this requires time-consuming programming and preparation that may not be feasible if there is a small batch of samples. 

Automatically identify colonies of the same type and count colonies in just a few clicks 

As of June 2021, help is at hand with the ColonyStar automatic from Funke-Gerber. The device, which is equipped with a camera and a cordless, detachable tablet makes the analysis of Petri dishes both fast and straightforward. The unique assist mode is particularly helpful: After tapping on a colony via touchscreen, other colonies of the same type are automatically recorded, marked, and counted. The selection can be corrected at any time. The lab worker retains full control while also achieving huge time savings. 

In order to mark 200 colonies, for example, only between four and 15 actions are necessary. The system can still be trained to identify selected colonies so that fully automatic colony counts can be conducted on predefined samples. Therefore, one can analyse ten to 15 Petri dishes containing the same species on the same agar media and then, after the learning phase, save it as a profile, such as Salmonella. Colonies of the same type that match these can then be analysed fully automatically.

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