Synbiosis has launched its ProtoCOL V1.4 colony counting and inhibition zone sizing software, designed to save microbiologists time, by automating many routine plate based image analysis tasks.
The ProtoCOL software is built for maximum flexibility and can be used to analyse images of the same or different coloured colonies on pour, spiral or surface inoculated plates and 3M Petrifilm, as well as measure inhibition zones on Single Radial Immunodiffusion (SRD) plates, and around antibiotic disks. The software, based on the latest Windows platform, has all the useful icons on one screen, so it is quick and simple for microbiologists to navigate and begin their image capture and analysis, with minimal training.
The ProtoCOL V1.4 software is Good Laboratory Practice compliant and supports 21CFR Part 11. It features many innovations for measuring zone sizes, including a gantry control system to allow microbiologists to automatically image large SRD plates. The software also measures inhibition zones from the edge of an antibiotic disc, and automatically subtracts disc diameter sizes to provide results as a zone size only. This not only saves manual calculation time, but also permits scientists to perform tests with different antibiotic disc sizes on one plate. The zone size results are automatically transcribed into Excel, and either an antibiotic or vaccine name can be entered into the database, which means it is easy to produce a full, secure audit trail for each specific therapy.
