The proposed instrument is a media sterilizer and petri dish filling system, including a printer for imprinting text on the side wall of petri dishes. The complete system must have true “walkaway” capability and be fully programmable and customizable. The instruments must be compatible with 90mm diameter and 25mm deep petri dishes and be able to pour a minimum of 200 plates in a single operation. The instrument will be installed in a research environment at the University of Ottawa.
General Description:
The petri dish filler and its associated media sterilizer will enable automated preparation of yeast agar media plates. There will be high demand for use of this infrastructure, as many thousands of petri dishes will be used each year in the Principal Investigator (PI) laboratory. The requested automated system for filling petri dishes would be an important productivity multiplier for lab personnel, who would not have to dedicate countless person-hours to the mundane task of pouring plates, thus releasing significant time for personnel. It has superior integration and automation features compared to other similar equipment, which minimizes the likelihood of operator errors that can ruin entire batches of media. This system prepares media plates more consistently and reproducibly than pouring plates by hand, as the volume of media dispensed by the machine would be exactly the same from plate to plate. The plates poured by this equipment would also be more consistently contamination-free than plates poured by hand, since a germicidal ultraviolet lamp irradiates the media as it is being dispensed into each plate. These are important considerations, since unintended variation between batches of manually poured plates can affect phenotypic results. The system is very flexible, in that it can be reconfigured for other media dispensing tasks into tubes or plates of various dimensions.
The Appendix A specifications contained in this RFP are the mandatory minimum requirements for the Petri Dish Filler with Media Sterilizer system.
