Synbiosis, a world-leading manufacturer of automated microbiological systems has introduced a new ProtoCOL system, Auto-Zone, to automate the measurement of inhibition zones used for antibiotic potency testing. This system provides accurate and reproducible inhibition zone sizing results in seconds, offering pharmaceutical companies increases in accuracy and reproducibility of results, whilst also saving valuable laboratory time and enabling more rapid commercial release of final products.

Synbiosis's automated microbiological system, Auto-Zone, is ideal for reading bioassay plates of up to 30cm by 30cm in size, containing up to 81 inhibition zones. At the press of a single button an entire bioassay plate is read without the need for any further human intervention. Many major pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world have already successfully used this fully integrated system.

The ProtoCOL system can read an entire plate, including the measurement of zones of inhibition and transcription of results, in only a few minutes, a process which manually can take up to one hour. This will therefore save users many hours of highly repetitive work. Zone size data produced conforms to published standards of accuracy and repeatability, and can be automatically transferred to a flexible Excel format. The results produced can be used with either in-house or Synbiosis's software for further processing such as statistical analysis.