Streaking ahead for microbiology

Robert Koch is remembered almost as much for the development of new methods of cultivating and staining bacteria as he is for his discovery that anthrax bacilli produce enduring endospores and identifying the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and cholera. Working with Walther Hesse, who developed agar as a culture medium, and Julius Richard Petri, of dish fame, at his laboratory at the Imperial Health Bureau in Berlin in the 1880s, Koch developed new methods of obtaining pure cultures and of staining bacteria to make them easily identifiable.

Not only did he get the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in 1905, but his methods are still pretty much the standard in preparing specimens in contemporary pathology laboratories, almost one hundred years after his death. The problem is, the traditional method of plating and streaking specimens is still a manual job and proves to be rather labour-intensive.

For John Glasson, chief scientist for clinical pathology at the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science (IMVS) in Adelaide, that seemed rather curious. Having watched automation of routine laboratory methods free up medical scientists for more important work in most areas of clinical pathology, the fact that diagnostic microbiology was still a little hamstrung by tradition needed to change.

About five years ago, Glasson undertook a review of the potential solutions on the market and found there weren’t any, setting him to thinking about how the process could be automated. He took a few preliminary ideas to the IMVS executive and then met up with a young biomedical engineer called Lachlan Smith, who was doing PhD studies through the University of Adelaide’s Department of Pathology.

Together, Glasson and Smith came up with the idea for what is now MicroStreak, a robotic system using a patented streaking applicator that can potentially automate up to 90 per cent of what is now performed manually. MicroStreak, which will be marketed as PREVI Isola by diagnostics giant bioMerieux, was launched at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in Spain in April, at the American Society of Microbiology meeting in Boston in May and at the Australian Society of Microbiology conference in Melbourne in July.

Glasson says he came up with the idea due to the increasing demands he could see in the area of diagnostic microbiology. “Some of the work has been increasing, particularly in microbiology, by five to 20 per cent a year,” he says. “And because it has been such a manual system, preparing specimens. The question was, why isn’t there automation available, as there is in chemistry and general clinical pathology? The automated streaker that we have now is the result of that.”

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