Colonizer: Anandroid OS based automated microbial colony counter
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Microbiology, Medical Genetics, Computational Science
- Keywords
- colony forming unit, microbiology, yeast, bacteria, cell phone, brewing
- Copyright
- © 2017 Kumar et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Colonizer: Anandroid OS based automated microbial colony counter. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2792v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2792v1
Abstract
Colony counting to estimate colony forming units (CFUs) is a standard microbiology procedure used for determining the number of viable microbes in a system. Typically this process is done manually, which is time consuming, tedious, and sometimes error prone. Alternate image analysis based systems are also time consuming. In this paper we develop and demonstrate a simpleandroid based automated colony counter, called Colonizer, also made freely available on Google Playstore. Our algorithm can also threshold and segment overlapping colonies and thus provide rapid, accurate counts across a wide range of colony densities (from 50-500 colonies/plate), for different microbes, using any android based phone or device.
Author Comment
This is an android OS based app for microbial colony counting (CFU estimation), and tested/validated for yeast (S. cerevisiae) and bacteria (E. coli). The app is free to use, and is available on Google Playstore, here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shashwat.opencv_java_androidstudio&hl=en