Automated Colony Counter at Major Yeast Genetics Lab

Synbiosis is delighted to announce its innovative ProtoCOL 2 automated colony counter is being utilised at the

prestigious Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA to rapidly and accurately count colonies of yeast, used as a model system for human DNA repair research. Geneticists in the Department of Biology at Emory University are using

ProtoCOL 2 to count colonies of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to accurately assess how many yeast cells can repair their DNA after they have been subjected to various types of mutagenesis. In general, repair systems in S.  cerevisiae are good models for human repair. Therefore, scientists at Emory believe that showing why and how cells repair their DNA in this yeast could help better understand and treat human diseases such as colorectal cancer associated with DNA mismatch repair defects.

Gray Crouse, Professor of Biology at Emory University, commented: “Since we need sufficient data points for statistical

analysis, we spent a lot of time manually counting hundreds of plates. This was a task our trained staff did not find enjoyable or easy. We tried image analysis software to automate the process but found it couldn’t discriminate different colonies if they were clumped together, as well as being very time consuming to use. We were shown a ProtoCOL 2  and were so impressed by its price and utility, that we installed one.” Professor Crouse continued: “ProtoCOL 2 can count colonies according to size or colour. To have a segregated count of different sizes or colours is an amazingly useful feature for us. Most importantly, ProtoCOL 2 indicates every colony it has

counted with a dot so we can manually review tricky areas.

Overall, we have been very pleased to have ProtoCOL 2 and it

is proving to be an invaluable addition to our lab.”

Paula Maia of Synbiosis said: “Many academic scientists want

to rapidly count colonies with inexpensive automation to

improve the accuracy of their results and we are pleased that

geneticists at Emory University believe our ProtoCOL 2 delivers

this. Their work indicates that if your lab wants a colony

counter to detect small colonies, or analyse colonies of varying

sizes and distinguish different coloured colonies, yet you don’t

have a huge budget for equipment, then you have to have a

ProtoCOL 2.”