EasyPick - Colony picking on the STAR platform by Hamilton Company

Compared to manual colony picking, the automated process is faster, more consistent and reliable. Therefore, numerous manufacturers offer dedicated colony pickers which process thousands of colonies per hour. For many laboratories, the colony picking throughput is not integrated with upstream or downstream automation systems. Consequently, the costly colony picker spends a lot of unproductive time waiting. With EasyPick, Hamilton introduces a system that automates both colony picking and sample preparation for related processes on a single, compact workstation.

The EasyPick colony picker is intended for colony types used in various processes such as cloning or screening of bacteria, yeast or phages. The EasyPick workstation can pick approximately 300 colonies per hour using disposable tips.

Since the EasyPick colony picker is based on a proven liquid handling platform, it is also able to automate processes such as plasmid isolation, gel loading or sample preparation for PCR, sequencing and others.