Colony Counting & Analysis: PhenoBooth

Counting E. coli colonies is easy. Counting pseudo-invisible, sausage-shaped colonies and excluding yellow circular ones isn’t. Oh wait, yes it is, I have a PhenoBooth.

Arrayed colony analysis of SBS rectangular plates

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, 13 megapixel HD camera and 4-channel, flat-field SpectraStar™ incident and transmission illumination to capture high-resolution colony images from Petri dishes and SBS plates.

How does it work?

Insert a Petri dish with visible bacteria, yeast or other microorganism 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, shape, fluorescent intensity, colour and brightness. Applications include Colony Counting, Growth Curves, Fluorescence (BFP/GFP/YFP) Detection, Serum Bactericidal Assay, Opsonophagocytic Killing Assay, Spiral Plate Analysis, Single Radial Immunodiffusion and Ames Testing.
Automatically export your images and .CSV files; Or connect to your LIMS database using PhenoBooth’s Open API.

Why do I need it?

Pick the hits that interest you – Filter colonies by: size, fluorescent intensity, colour, circularity or brightness
Get the best results – Second to none. Top quality illumination and photography for top quality analysis
Analyse anything – Select from any of 3 SpectraStar™ incident illumination channels: white, blue and ultraviolet or 1 transmission illumination channel. Also accepts standard 25mm colour filters
Remove variables – Batch processing and analysis of your plates with a single click
Stop wasting effort – Nothing compares. 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

	PACKAGE
PLUG-IN	COLONY COUNTING	COLONY PICKING	COLONY SCREENING
Colony Size
Colony Circularity
Colour
Fluorescence
Colony Coordinates Export
Colony Picker Integration
Gene Mapping
Plate Normalisation
Heatmap Visualisation
Control vs. Experiment Comparison (in replicate)

ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE PACKAGES:

COLONY PICKING

High-throughput Screening Synthetic Genetic Array SGA - ROTOR HDA

COLONY SCREENING

What plates can I use with PhenoBooth?

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.

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, density, circularity, circumference and colour. If you want to make a measurement that doesn’t currently exist, just contact us and we’ll write the plugin!

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!

See User Guide

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PhenoBooth Colony Imaging & Analysis Technical Specifications

Product Code

SFI-001

Footprint

L: 30.5 cm x W: 30.5 cm x H: 31.5 cm

Weight

22 kg

Power Requirements

100-200V AC 50-60 Hz, Power 60 W

Camera Specifications

Scientific grade, HD CMOS

Auto focus lens

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Hardware/Software Requirements

Intel Core i5 2.4GHz
4GB of RAM
512GB hard disk space
Microsoft Windows 7 (64-bit)/Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
USB 3.0 port

Standard Package Included

Colony Counting

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Colony Picking Platform

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

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. Singer products are designed for reliability, longevity, speed, and ease-of-use. Singer service packages augment these design criteria by increasing life-expectancy and increasing device reliability with preventative 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.

Singer Support is an excellent and cost effective service that gives you unlimited access to Singer technical experts by phone, email, or VOIP. All requests are entered into the Singer ticketing system that allow both you 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.

Singer Support packages are extendable and can be bought in 1 or 3 year packages with a discount applied for the 3 year package. There are 2 levels of cover offered – Support and Support Plus.

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Accurate Colony Picking Platform

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.

High-Throughput Screening: ROTOR HDA

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.

Automatic Plate Pouring: Serial Filler

The Serial Filler is a compact, versatile and efficient media dispensing instrument that accepts a range of Petri dishes and SBS-format plates. Equipped with a UV lamp and multiple HEPA cabinet and venting filters, the Serial Filler produces superior quality agar plates of consistent volume in a sterile enclosure, which greatly reduces any threat of contamination.

Single Colony Picking: The Stinger

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.

Colony Counting & Analysis: PhenoBooth