Synbiosis, a world-leading manufacturer of automated microbiological systems announces the introduction of two new ProtoCOL automated colony counters, ProtoCOL SR and ProtoCOL HR. The systems are ideal for microbiologists requiring high performance automated counts of a wide range of colony types.

Both systems come with powerful new software for colony counting, inhibition zone sizing and antibacterial susceptibility zone sizing as standard. The latest firewire technology employed allows scientists to capture live high resolution sample images in full colour. To simultaneously analyse different coloured colonies on chromogenic media, the systems can be upgraded with an optional software module.

The new ProtoCOL software, built on a state of the art Windows XP platform, has a number of valuable time saving features. These include displaying all useful parameters on one screen to simplify the operation. The measurement settings applied are automatically recorded for future use and size and shape discrimination facilities can be used to exclude unwanted artefacts from counts. The software's data handling capabilities provide safe storage of results with changes to data automatically logged, whilst maintaining a copy of the original information. The final results can be instantly transferred to the pre-loaded Excel and sorted across projects too, if required.

The sensitivity of both ProtoCOL systems can be optimised to ensure accurate separation of touching colonies through the use of a powerful new size sensitivity feature. In terms of applications, a ProtoCOL HR is the best counter for measuring small colonies (down to 0.1 mm diameter) or zones, and for larger colony sizes (0.2mm and above) the ProtoCOL SR is expected to be the system of choice.

Simon Johns, International Product Manager for Synbiosis commented: "We have made the ProtoCOL HR and SR systems so versatile that they can size zones and enumerate colonies on pour, spread and spiral plates, as well as on 3M ™ PetriFilm ™. Their outstanding capabilities more than meet new quality standards in many laboratories so that microbiologists performing counts of densely plated microorganisms or colonies with different morphologies will enjoy unrivalled precision."