Synthetic Biology

Picking the right colonies

For the synthetic biologist, biological building blocks are often generated from bacteria. The design-build-test process is utilized in order to engineer these building blocks. This often requires screening and picking colonies of interest.

Traditionally, colony picking is performed manually, using sterile pipette tips, toothpicks, or inoculation loops, which is a slow, labor-intensive, and time-consuming process. Synthetic biology research can, therefore, benefit greatly from the flexibility and throughput of automated colony pickers. Not only will automated colony pickers make the entire process quicker (picking up to 3,000 clones per hour), but the results are more consistent and reliable, increasing the quality of the data produced.

Some of the benefits of automated colony picking for synthetic biology:

• Enables higher throughput while minimizing manual labor
• Provides consistent, objective colony picking instead of subjective, manual picking
• Accommodates a broad range of different applications
• Electronic data tracking allows for well-documented data control

A typical microbial colony picker workflow