The GALT Prospector™: A Novel Platform for Automated High-Throughput Cultivation and Isolation of Microorganisms

There is increasing recognition of the importance of cultivating microbial isolates from environmental samples for further study, building biobanks, and microbial product development. Cultivation technologies typically used today are slow, resource and space intensive, and have variable success. There is a need for new technologies to improve efficiency and success rate of microbial cultivation projects.

The Prospector is a new system to automate high-throughput cultivation and isolation of pure cultures from complex microbiomes. Clonal cultures are grown in an array of thousands of nanoliter microwells and these cultures are transferred to larger volumes for scale up to obtain sufficient biomass for downstream applications.

The Prospector is agnostic to the origin of the sample (aerobic and anaerobic cultivation are possible) and the cell preparation protocol. For incubation, a variety of media have been validated. The suspension of cells is applied to a microscope slide-sized array comprising >6,000 nanoliter-volume microwells acting as growth chambers. The loading cell density ensures single occupancy of individual microwells. The microwells are sealed with a gas permeable membrane which prevents cross talk and contamination of individual wells. During incubation of the array, bacteria in each occupied microwell proliferate into clonal colonies. Metabolic activity is monitored in the Prospector using a redox indicator and fluorescence imaging (red, green, and blue channels are available). The Prospector software then analyzes the images, generates the transfer lists, and drives the automated, aseptic transfer of cells from the nanoliter array well to a standard multi-well plate. There, biomass is scaled up and subsequent use of the cultures (identification, characterization, and storage) is possible.

In our poster, we will present data of microbiome characterization through cultivation of isolates from a variety of environments, including marine samples.