Processing of bacterial colony images for automatic isolation and transfer

Abstract

A method for processing and analysing images of bacterial colonies growing on solid bacterial medium is presented. The procedure determines the position of single colonies, intended for further inoculum transfer by a specially designed life-science laboratory robot. The image processing and analysis of Streptomyces colonies are described. The procedure can be employed to isolate antibiotic producers for the pharmaceutical industry; a similar process can be used to automate methods of charting human genomic DNA.