What can I use ROTOR+ PIXL for?

Carrying out a high-throughput antibiotic, drug, and chemical sensitivity screens and isolating the resistant clones.

Filter, pick, streak, and optimise interesting environmental isolates or microbiota. 

Duplicate, scale-up, and back up large libraries of yeast, fungi, bacteria, and algae.

Re-array groups, or cherry-pick individual colonies from large microbial arrays.

Re-plate cells from liquid to agar and vice versa.

Replicate, mate, and re-array from single or multiple source plates at densities of 96, 384, 1536 and 6144. See examples of ROTOR+ pinning arrays here.

Synthetic Genetic Array (SGA), Chemical Genomics, Yeast 2-hybrid, and other cell-based screening assays.

Condense or expand your library for smart storage.

Select fluorescent markers.

ROTOR+ uses a robotic arm and sterile, ready-to-use replica plating pads, called RePads, to pick up arrayed colonies from solid or liquid culture plates. The robotic arm then moves to a new ‘target’ plate and deposits the cells.

Capable of pinning nearly a million colonies per hour, ROTOR+ can complete a screen faster than any liquid handler. It is the highest throughput colony manipulation robot in the world (by a considerable margin). And amazingly, it does this whilst maintaining a >99% transfer efficiency.

ROTOR+ enables large-scale microbial functional and chemical genomic studies with incredible accuracy and reliability. ROTORs have been cited >10,000 times.

Pick to and from agar and liquid in a variety of plate types. Customise your workflow with plate sectoring. Scrape, stir, and adjust mixing profiles to optimise the transfer of the most tenacious organisms

PIXL automates high-resolution colony imaging, detection, selection, and picking. Transfer of microbial colonies is achieved using the freshly-cut end of a sterile polymer reel, called PickupLine. Like ROTOR+, this eliminates the requirement for extensive washing cycles and the associated chance of contamination.

Turn on its fluorescent LEDs and PIXL will quantify and allow selection for wtGFP, sfGFP, mCherry, tagBFP, Venus and many other fluorescent markers.

High density pinning

Pick colonies of interest to 96 or 384 targets using PIXL and upscale the density to 1534 or 6144 using ROTOR+

High-throughput cell plating

Both ROTOR+ and PIXL support streaking from a liquid or agar source. This protocol automates high-throughput plating of microbial organisms, allowing researchers to plate 96 samples onto one target plate efficiently.

Random colony picking

Pick randomly distributed (or arrayed) colonies by filtering for size, circularity, proximity, colour, and other measurements

Sector your source plates

Sectoring your plates enables you to: Categorise groups of clones, isolates or mutant strains on a single plate; Experiment using a different antibiotic, antimicrobial or chemical treatments on the same plate.

Condense your library

Pin up to 6144 colonies on each plate. Meaning use >60x fewer plates per screen: Gain >60x more storage space in your lab; >60x cost reduction on expensive reagents

Pinning PickupLine

Singer Instruments have over thirty years of precision microbial cell and colony picking experience. Whether colony picking from high-density E. coli arrays, or tetrad dissection with single yeast spores, Singer Instruments are trusted by thousands of labs worldwide. We have learnt a lot about colony picking over the years, and have used this experience to develop PickupLine.

PickupLine is a brand new tip technology made from 1mmø bespoke polymer extrusion, available in sterile 200m reels. Load a single reel into PIXL to form up to 33,000 sterile, disposable tips. Its cutting-characteristics allow PIXL’s precision blade to produce a coarse tip, perfect for picking bacteria and fungal colonies.