QPix Microbial Colony Pickers

Automated microbial screening system capable of picking up to 3,000 colonies per hour

The QPix® Microbial Colony Picker leverages best-in-class colony picking technology to alleviate bottlenecks and quickly, accurately, and efficiently screen through massive genetic libraries. The easy-to-use, intuitive software guides users through setting up colony picking runs where precision robotics pick the right colonies every time.. In addition to microbial screening, the system automates several sample preparation and plate handling processes such as transfer of bacterial liquid culture and plating on agar.

Data is automatically recorded into the machine’s database, providing users with a complete audit trail and sample tracking, ensuring that no data is ever lost. Our modular, scalable series of colony pickers allows groups of all sizes to increase the accuracy and throughput of their workflow, while still allowing for future throughput growth.

Phage display workflow

Automated solutions to increase workflow efficiency of your phage display

The phage display workflow is a robust, easy to perform, and inexpensive method by which to identify specific high-affinity antigen binders from large combinatorial libraries containing up to billions of potentially clinically relevant antibodies. This makes it especially suited to benefit from the addition of automated solutions, which will allow you to decrease the manual effort required to identify your most promising antibody targets and fast track discovery.

Phage display steps

Step 1: Panning

Panning is an iterative process for enriching phage within a population that possess high affinity binding to a target of interest compared to others. Begin by enriching your population of phage with high-affinity binding by exposing the library to your antigen of choice and then eluting and amplifying only those with the highest binding affinity.

Step 2: Colony picking

Bacteriophage selected from the previous step are then cloned and picked in order to isolate each unique protein binder.

Step 3: Ag-antibody interactions

During panning, phages displaying proteins with higher binding affinity are selected in relation to phages displaying lower affinity proteins. This qualitative selection process requires validation using more quantitative immunoassays to assess antibody-antigen interactions such as ELISA, immunofluorescence, HTRF, complement fixation, agglutination, and/or precipitation.

Step 4: Functional screening

Following the characterization of antibody-antigen interactions, candidate molecules are then screened for functional activity (e.g. viral neutralization or vaccine efficacy), often using cell-based assays.