QPix® FLEX™ Microbial Colony Picking System

The QPix FLEX™ Microbial Colony Picking System is an integrated, automated benchtop workcell engineered to streamline and standardize the entire microbial cell line development workflow. Purpose-built to eliminate manual variability, fragmentation, and contamination risks, the system consolidates automated agar plating, streaking, colony picking, and liquid handling into a single, space-saving instrument. It achieves a documented baseline of over 95% picking efficiency, 99% picking accuracy, and 0% cross-contamination in validated screening protocols.

Target Applications

• Microbiome Research & Anaerobic Microbiology: Optimized for fastidious or rare anaerobic microbial communities requiring sterile technique, precise colony isolation, and direct compatibility within standard hypoxic/anaerobic chambers.

• Synthetic Biology & Plasmid Production: High-throughput automated colony recovery and hit picking post-transformation to accelerate discovery, validation, and preparation cycles.

• Protein & Enzyme Engineering: Automated library screening of variants for downstream parallel analysis, correlating visible phenotype traits with early expression output.

• Microbial Strain Engineering: Rapid selection and differentiation of top-producing strains from large mutagenic libraries based on subtle phenotypic criteria such as size, shape, proximity, and color.

• Food Safety & Environmental QC: Automated pathogen screening and isolation (e.g., E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria) using selective media grouping to shorten turnaround times.

• Natural Product & Pigment Discovery: Phenotype-driven isolation of target strains through automated colorimetric identification of metabolic pigments, allowing researchers to group and rank unique colonies early in the workflow.

Key Capabilities & System Advantages

• Hypoxic and Anaerobic Chamber Integration: Sized and structurally configured with a compact footprint to operate natively inside standard low-oxygen and anaerobic environments where traditional automation systems fail to function.

• Phenotype-Based Colony Selection: Equipped with a 20-megapixel CMOS high-resolution color camera and white light trans-illumination system to classify, group, and rank target colonies based on precise color, morphology, size, shape, and proximity criteria.

• Multi-Function 4-Channel Pipetting Head: Eliminates independent fluid-handling steps by automating complex liquid transfers, media dispensing, glycerol addition, agar plating, and hit picking within the same instrument without needing additional hardware.

• Swappable Tip System: Allows hardware-free switching between eco-friendly, reusable sterilizable metal picking pins and disposable plastic filter tips (supporting 50 uL, 200 uL, and 1000 uL volumes) to easily tailor operations to specific workflow budgets or sterility controls.

• Comprehensive Sample Traceability: Features an integrated 2D barcode reader that links and tracks every plate and pick from source to destination, maintaining complete audit trails and data integrity.

• Precision Mechanical Reliability: Utilizes an ultrasonic agar height sensor to detect pouring volume variations across agar surfaces, automatically modulating robotic movement to guarantee gentle, repeatable colony pick-ups.