10024589OGI Bio Follow on Fund - COVID Resilience FundClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKIn the microbiology sector, early stage R&D involves large amounts of manually culturing microbial samples. This is inefficient for companies, who would like to automate, but existing automation is expensive and tailored for mammalian cultures. Furthermore, the current method for estimating microbial growth doesn't provide sufficient information for industrial biotechnology applications, pharmacological work on antimicrobial resistance or academic research, because all these sectors require accurate information on cell morphology as well as cell number and biomass. OGI will offer customers an inexpensive route into routine microbial culturing on a system that is smaller than more expensive systems currently available but is also modular, allowing customers to retrofit additional functionality to our system as and when required. This includes novel and increased analytical information such as inline, automatic microscopy imaging of individual cells within the population.