Counting E. coli colonies is easy. Counting irregular translucent colonies while excluding circular yellow ones isn’t… unless you have
What is it?
The PhenoBooth+ Colony Counter is a fast, super-easy to use, closed-chamber Colony Counter for imaging and analysis of colonies on agar. It uses a scientific-grade camera and produces 23 megapixel plate images. It includes five lighting channels to capture high-resolution colony images from Petri dishes and rectangular plates.
How does it work?
Insert a Petri dish with visible bacteria, yeast or other microorganisms into the input tray; select your preferred wavelength; autofocus and capture your plates in seconds. Filter for properties of interest just once; hit ‘Batch Analyse’ and walk away as PhenoBooth+ automates the tedious analysis across all of your plates with a single click.
Colonies can be filtered by size, colour, circularity and brightness. Applications include Colony Counting, Growth Curves, and Fluorescence (BFP/GFP/YFP/mCherry*) Detection.
*The PhenoBooth+ is not a microscope! It is a macroscopic CCD imaging workstation. As such it will not detect sub-cellular or low levels of expression.
The image above is an unedited export directly from PhenoBooth+ showing Saccharomyces Cerevisiae colonies at 300% magnification.
Effortlessly capture every colony
Why do I need it?
Comprehensive Phenotyping – Filter colonies by size, colour, circularity and brightness
Get the best results – Second to none. Top-quality illumination and photography for optimal analysis
Analyse anything – Select from any of 4 SpectraStar™ incident illumination channels: white, blue, cyan, and violet or 1 transmission illumination channel. Accepts standard 25mm emissions filters for fluorescence detection.
Time Saving – Batch processing and analysis across hundreds of images with a single click.
Versatile – Detect every colony, every time, even at 6,144 array density
Future-proof your lab – Application-specific software packages, such as Colony Screening or Colony Picking are integrated seamlessly with additional plug-ins available for advanced functionality.
PLUG-IN
COLONY COUNTING
COLONY PICKING
COLONY SCREENING
Colony Size
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Colony Circularity
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Colour
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Fluorescence
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Colony Coordinates Export
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Colony Picker Integration
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Gene Mapping
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Heatmap Visualisation
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Control vs. Experiment Comparison (in replicate)
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Multiple lighting options
Enhance your fluorescent lighting options
Screening for fluorescence on agar is advantageous because
it is cost-effective and very high-throughput.
Wave Lengths
Top and bottom white illumination plus three colour channels included
as standard.
Blue, Violet and Cyan
Relative Luminous Intensity vs. Wavelength is shown below. Violet: 50% intensity range from 375 – 400nm, with peak ~390nm. Blue: 50% intensity range from 465 – 475nm, with a peak at 470nm. Cyan: 50% intensity range from 490 – 530nm with a peak of 510nm.
The PhenoBooth+ accepts Singer PlusPlates and any SBS-format rectangular plates. Want to colony count on 90mm Petri dishes? We’ve got an adaptor for that too.
How many plates does PhenoBooth+ take?
PhenoBooth+ takes one plate at a time to ensure that every plate received identical lighting and exposure setting, which is necessary to maximize data quality and save time on downstream analysis.
How fast is PhenoBooth+?
It takes PhenoBooth+ only 5 seconds to image one plate. This means that you could image up to 720 plates in an hour. It is that fast!
Does it come with a stacker?
No, it doesn’t. Because PhenoBooth+ is so fast, you don’t need to waste time loading plates onto a stacker.
What type of lighting is available in PhenoBooth+?
PhenoBooth+ offers two types of lighting options: transmitted (back) light to maximize contrast between colonies and background, and incident (top) light to capture colour. The PhenoBooth+ is available in two different LEDs set-ups. The standard PhenoBooth+ includes UV, blue and white light. The PhenoBooth+ Cyan option includes cyan, blue and white light.
What is the Colony Picking Platform?
The Colony Picking Platform is made up of the PhenoBooth+, the ROTOR HDA and The Stinger. Image randomly arrayed colonies using the PhenoBooth+, then filter and select colonies of interest using the Colony Picking software package. The colony coordinates can be exported and loaded into the ROTOR HDA screening robot and picked into an array by The Stinger single colony picker head.
What exactly does the software do?
PhenoBooth+’s software is a powerful solution with an intuitive UI for colony measurements and analysis. It consists of 6 fully integrated steps, including Image Acquisition, Pre-processing, Detection, Filtering, Analysis and Visualisation. Fully automate your favourite workflow.
What colony features does the PhenoBooth+ measure?
The PhenoBooth+ measures most phenotypes, including size, colour, circularity and brightness. If you want to make a measurement that doesn’t currently exist, just contact us and we’ll write the plugin!
Can the PhenoBooth+ detect sub-cellular or low levels of fluorescent expression?
The PhenoBooth+ is not a microscope! It is a macroscopic CCD imaging workstation. As such it will not detect sub-cellular or low levels of expression. The in-house strains used to successfully test PhenoBooth+’s fluorescence detection have a fluorophore molarity of 1.84E-30 nM per cell. As such we cannot guarantee fluorescence detection below this value.
Can I perform data analysis as well?
Absolutely! The PhenoBooth+ is your one-stop solution for SGA analysis. It measures and normalises colony features, compares measurements on experimental and control plates, identifies and presents “hits” on a heat map or a chart. In addition, there will be extra plugins and packages available to customise workflow that deviate from standard SGA analysis.
How many software Licenses do I get?
You get three 1-year user licenses as standard! Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to use the PhenoBooth+ software with an expired license, but will miss out on some additional benefits. Additional licenses can be purchased at any time.
Help! I need PhenoBooth+ to do THIS for me!
SI constantly makes new software plugins for the PhenoBooth+ to fulfil different analysis needs. Please contact us if you have a good idea for what PhenoBooth+ should do next. We’d love to hear from you!
The PhenoBooth+ can be purchased as part of the Colony Picking Platform which also includes the ROTOR and The Stinger.
Image plates of organisms such as yeast, fungi, bacteria and algae grown on solid or in liquid media using the PhenoBooth+. Select hits by phenotypes such as size, circularity, colour or fluorescent intensity. Import this data into the ROTOR HDA and use The Stinger to transfer cells from hits onto solid or into liquid media. See the video
Support
Singer Instruments has a long-standing reputation for fantastic service and support, for which we are very proud. Our motto, ‘a responsibility to science’, extends to our service and support whereby our primary motivation is to eliminate, or at least minimise, your experimental downtime. We design our products for reliability, longevity, speed, and ease-of-use. Our Lab Support packages augment these design criteria by increasing life-expectancy and increasing device reliability with preventive and predictive maintenance. Should any reactive maintenance be called upon, our time, cost and carbon efficient support should get you up and running in the shortest time possible.
Singer Instruments’ products are fully guaranteed against faulty materials or workmanship for one year from the date of commissioning. Should the product be controlled by a computer, the guarantee necessitates internet connectivity for remote access* availability.
Singer Lab Support is an excellent and cost effective service that gives the Laboratory unlimited access to Singer technical experts by phone, email, VOIP or remote access. All requests are entered into the Singer ticketing system that allows both the Laboratory and Singer Instruments to log, track and monitor any reported issues from initial contact through to resolution. While we aim to respond to all queries within 24 hours, our average response times are far less.
Our Singer Lab Support packages come with discounts for multiple years, multiple products and renewals. We offer 2 levels of cover – Lab Support and Lab Support Plus.
*remote access – a highly secure method of allowing a Singer Instruments engineer access to your machine via an Internet connection. Not applicable for all products.
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Meet our Scientists
Harry Singer CEO
PhD in Quantum Chaos, first genetics conference and tetrad dissection aged 6
Jan Singer Scientific Advisor (Europe)
Genetic manipulation instructor at Cold Spring Harbor Yeast Genetics and Genomics Course since 2007
Leah Ashley Scientific Advisor (Asia)
PhD from the University of Nottingham in Synthetic Biology, studying synthetic spider silk
Pete Jones Scientific Advisor (North America)
PhD from the University of Nottingham in Plant Molecular Biology, and further studies in the molecular mechanisms of cell division and investigating the mechanisms of heart disease
Question for Technical Support?
Log-in to our dedicated Technical Support forum, where you will find FAQs and detailed support assistance. Alternatively send us an email using the address below:
Picking accuracy, or the ability to pick a microbial colony precisely without touching other unwanted materials, is by far the most important reason why we replace humans with robots for picking hundreds, if not thousands, of colonies in the lab. Robotic pickers provide consistency, repeatability, and are able to work for long hours.
However, not all robotic pickers are able to pick colonies with high accuracy. Many robotic pickers failed to pick with high accuracy for various reasons. That is why it is important to thoroughly test the picking accuracy of any colony pickers.
The ROTOR is the fastest and most powerful colony manipulation robot in the world. It is essential for any large-scale microbial functional or chemical genomic studies.
The Stinger is an automated modular extension to the ROTOR HDA robot for easy, ultra-fast rearrangement of high-density library arrays of yeast, other fungi, bacteria, and algae from colonies grown on solid agar or in liquid culture. It is designed for the picking and spotting of user-specified colonies from high-density arrays onto solid agars in 96-, 384-, 1536-, and 6144-density format.
