PetriPlater™: Automated streaking of microbial samples

Affordable automation for the labor intensive task of petri-dish inoculation and streaking

Modern microbiology labs face the need to efficiently handle an increasing number of samples. One of the most labor intensive tasks in a clinical lab is the inoculation and streaking of samples on various types of agar plates. This repetitive task is performed by microbiologists in a specific pattern to achieve colony isolation crucial for downstream analysis. Scirobotics PetriPlater™ add-on for Tecan robots is an affordable solution that allows full automation of the streaking and isolation task while reducing lab operation cost and increasing performance and reliability.

Product Description:

The PetriPlater™ is an add-on device and software for Tecan robots. The product enables automated sample streaking using liquid samples such as blood and urine samples as a source. Combined with Scirobotics Pickolo™ colony-picking module it enables the process of inoculation directly from bacterial colony on agar. The samples may be a loaded from diverse kind of tube and allow automated barcode identification and sample tracking. A sterile filtered disposable tip is used both to dispense the sample onto the plate and to streak it in a spiral pattern. The tip passes more than 15 times through the sample to assure reliable isolation every time. Agar detection assures reliable streaking at any agar height and liquid detection assures reliable aspiration of sample. This method achieves excellent colony isolation from high concentration culture as shown in the image. The PetriPlater™ performs the streaking task using only a single disposable tip and no additional proprietary consumables are required, saving considerable costs and allowing the customer to enjoy good ROI even in medium throughput labs. The same hardware can be used for preparing samples for MALDI-TOF Microbial Identification using SciRobotics PickoloMI™, saving additional costs.