What is PIXL?
An ultra-reliable and super-easy-to-use microbial colony picker .
PIXL automates imaging, colony recognition, colony selection, and picking; from Petri dishes to multiwell plates.
99% transfer efficiency
With agar surface detection on every pick, PIXL will never miss a colony, damage plates or splash cells all over the place.
Train everyone
90% of the functionality can be learned in as little as 10 minutes. Long gone are the days of needing specialist technicians.
Unique picking technology
33,000 sterile, disposable tips in a single, low-cost PickupLine. That’s <2 cents per pick, cheaper than a pipette tip.
“I chose PIXL because it is the most accurate and reliable colony picker that I’ve seen.
The throughput is slightly lower than some colony pickers, but it’s agar detection and transfer rates are better,
which is more important to us when picking our valuable libraries.”
Professor Patrick Cai, co-founder of the Edinburgh Genome Foundry
PIXL Workflows
Our software engineers understand your biology! We work closely with our scientific collaborators
to make sure our user interface thinks like you do.
Colony Picking
Pick irregularly distributed colonies from circular, rectangular, or square plates to agar or liquid target plates. Customise your workflow with loads of sectoring, layout, and mixing options.
Colony Detection
Image and detect your colonies of interest according to your choice of parameters and export experimental data without running a workflow.
Zone of Inhibition
Automatically identify central colonies, measure their inhibition zones, and pick colonies of interest. Perfect for halo assays.
Re-array
Pick colonies from user-defined locations and place them at user-defined positions. Customisable to incorporate your preferred labware or choice of targets.
Synthesising a designer yeast chromosome with the help of PIXL
Colony picking with PIXL.
1700+ happy microbiologists and counting.
Which PIXL setup is right for you?
Check out our full range of colony picking solutions and discover the perfect PIXL setup.
PIXL
Everyone’s favourite colony picker.
An ultra-reliable and super easy-to-use colony picker, capable of picking every colony as meticulously as you would.
PIXL Dark
For robotic arms and anaerobic chambers.
PIXL Dark comes with the added benefit of an automatic door, so it’s compatible with integration providers and also great for tight spaces.
ROTOR+ PIXL
The ultimate colony picking combo.
Combining ROTOR+ with PIXL lets you pick and re-plate at densities up to 6144 and at a rate of nearly a million colonies an hour.
Frequently asked questions
Source plates in random colony picking mode can be 90mm and 150mm Petri dishes, ANSI single-well rectangular microplates, or 120mm square plates.
Compatible target plates within the random colony picking workflow are 96 and 384 multiwell or deep well microplates, PCR plates, MALDI-TOF slides, and ANSI single-well rectangular microplates with pinning densities ranging from 96-1536. Allowing you to create custom workflows to suit your lab’s needs.
PIXL can pick from and to a variety of plate types including liquid using re-array mode. Check it out here: https://www.singerinstruments.com/resource/versatile/
PIXL maintenance is very minimal and intuitive, with easy-to-follow instructions on the user interface. Changing the PickupLine is straightforward, minimising experimental downtime.
“The maintenance is really low, even changing the filament is a piece of cake. Everyone can use the machine.” Dr. Daniel Schindler from the Max Planck Institute
We have distributors across the world in:
North America, Europe & rest of world (Singer Instruments)
Australia (BioTools)
China (Punmicro)
Estonia (Lanmer OÜ)
India, Nepal and Bangladesh (iLife Biotech)
Japan (Asahi Techneion and MinervaTech)
Korea (Mo’z Science)
Latin America (Mendel)
Taiwan (Major Instruments)
If you have any questions regarding distribution please get in touch here.
PIXL was designed with automation in mind. We are happy to work with automation providers to integrate PIXL into larger workflows. Get in touch here to find out more information.
PIXL holds one source plate and four destination plates, however, in re-array mode, you can cherry-pick from multiple source plates to the same destination plate. Schedule a chat with a Scientific Advisor here to explore how to automate your workflow with PIXL.
PIXL can use both liquid and agar source plates, and it can pin to liquid and agar target plates in any combination.
Get in touch
Book a 30-minute slot to discuss your workflow with one of our product experts, or ask us anything.