I have been following LBT for over a year now, automated agar plate screening is a great idea with practical time-saving benefits for microbiologists in the lab. However, as far as I am aware the technology is being used very specifically at the moment I.e. in diagnosing Staphaureus colonies in a plating as the first step in determining if it is a multi-resistant strain (MRSA). I was a little disappointed to read that the time saved for technologists was estimated to be around 10%, which seemed to be pretty low to me. The paper stated that the APAS machine was screening 200 plates/hour which is about 3-4 plates per minute and is faster than a trained microbiologist but not by a great deal. I would expect that LBT will be working towards speeding up the process of screening.
