About us

“We bought an aCOLade colony counter for our lab in 2011 because we needed a reliable, simple to use, anti-glare manual colony counter. We are now counting colonies on around 50 plates every day of all sorts of different bacterial and fungal colonies with aCOLade and have found aCOLade is sensitive, has a nice viewing magnifying glass and best of all we don’t have any reflection problems when counting white colonies on TVC plates.”

“When we needed help the Synbiosis team was very good. We know we can call to ask them anything to do with the aCOLade and they will respond very quickly. The aCOLade is brilliant and we’ll definitely re-order an aCOLade from Synbiosis when we need another colony counter.”

Val Burton, Laboratory Supervisor

Pukka Pies, Leicester, UK

“We’ve had our ProtoCOL at the Robert Mondavi Institute since 2010 and the system is saving us so much time and a huge amount of manual work when counting colonies cultured from the food we’re testing in our field trials.”

“We look for Salmonella and E.coli 0157 and often use different chromogenic media to count blue, purple, white or even black colonies on many different colored background. Unlike some systems, the ProtoCOL can recognize and count all these colony types with ease. We also use spiral plates, gridded filters and pour plates, yet the ProtoCOL system can distinguish very small colonies and also grid lines from colonies. We can directly export results to Excel which saves us time with rekeying results and our undergrads like the system as it is not complicated to use. We’re very happy we chose a ProtoCOL for our research.”

Dr Anne-Laure Moyne, Staff Research Associate

Robert Mondavi Institute, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

“At Jamjoom Pharma we manufacture antibiotic, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products. In 2010, we installed a Synbiosis ProtoCOL to help speed up the colony counting and antibiotic sensitivity testing in our quality control processes. The technical people at Synbiosis were very helpful because they advised us how to set up the ProtoCOL system to operate to comply with GMP.”

“We chose the ProtoCOL because the system has the latest plate imaging technology and the way the software has been written means it is easy to obtain and store an image of each plate and the count data together. The fact ProtoCOL does this, made the ProtoCOL stand out as the right system for us.”

Dr Aamer Khatri, Senior Manager, QC

Jamjoom Pharma, Saudi Arabia

“We use yeast as a model system for studying cellular changes in colon cancer. We spent a lot of time counting thousands of yeast colonies, a task which our trained staff found to be very laborious and prone to error. We tried some image analysis software to automate the process but it just could not accurately discriminate different colonies and was tedious to use. We were shown a ProtoCOL 2 by a colleague and because the ProtoCOL 2 has so much utility, yet is priced so that an academic lab can afford it; in 2009 we purchased one.”

“We love our ProtoCOL 2 as it can count plates with over 2000 colonies on them, some as small as a pencil point, and it can even segregate counts according to colony size or color, which is an amazingly useful feature. ProtoCOL 2 indicates every colony it has counted with a dot, which means we are always in full control of the final count and it saves the images automatically so we can look at them again if we need to. We didn’t think a colony counter this good existed, but it does and now we wouldn’t be without our ProtoCOL 2.”

Professor Gray Crouse, Professor of Biology

Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

“We wanted to standardise our test for the activity of bacteriocides in food and this is why in 2008 after reviewing several automated systems we chose to install the AutoZONE automated zone measurement system.”

“The AutoZONE is great because it can cope with different agar thicknesses and saves us time with keying in, as the system automatically transfers results to Excel. Overall, we are very pleased with the performance of the AutoZONE and with the support we have had from Synbiosis”.

Malene Svejstrup, Application Scientist

Food Protection, Danisco, Denmark

“In 2001, we developed a method to assess the mutagenicity of the gaseous substances using an Ames Test. To count the bacteria, we had an original ProtoCOL system with a black and white camera, which gave excellent results and is still in routine use.”

“When we started Cultex in 2007 to offer this method commercially, we had no hesitation in installing a ProtoCOL because it is a robust system that produces accurate results time after time. Today our ProtoCOL provides good reproducible data - exactly what we need to confidently provide our clients with sound predictions about substance genotoxicity.”

Professor Michaela Aufderheide, Manager

Cultex Laboratories, Germany

“The ProtoCOL automated zone sizing system came with good IQ and OQ documentation and our local Synbiosis agent, Besha Analitika was very helpful with the set up. This meant we installed and validated the ProtoCOL’s performance for use in our GMP vaccine facility in time to test our seasonal flu vaccine batch.”

“Using the ProtoCOL we measured thousands of zones on serial radial immunodiffusion plates in much less time than we did in 2007, which really helped us release our flu vaccine to market sooner.”

Mrs lin Susanti, Head of Quality Control

Bio Farma, Bandung, Indonesia

“We have used the ProtoCOL automated colony counter since 2004 for food microbiology education and research and have been very happy with its performance. The ProtoCOL is an excellent tool for our food hygiene students because with minimal training, they can easily understand how to use the system and can rapidly obtain accurate results from complex counts of different bacteria isolated from food samples such as shellfish, sausages and beef burgers.”

Edmund Slaine, Scientific Officer

College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise, Northern Ireland