Microbial photometry,
made easy

By bioscientists, for bioscientists.

We dreamt of phenotyping microbes and running evolution experiments with antibiotics at much higher-throughput, using many more strains and conditions than before.


The solution had to be cheap, small, portable and accurate. So, with EPSRC funding, we set about leveraging low-cost robotics, adapting some LED lighting technology and using our own algorithm-building expertise to create the kind of device we wished we could buy.


After all, spectrophotometer costs seem so high: Why isn't there a cheaper way of phenotyping microbes?

Now there is. If you need to screen large collections of genomic perturbations of some microbial strain or if you need to increase your screening technology on a budget, the LiMO can help.

It's an accurate, low-cost, lightweight, small-footprint, low-energy, 3-wavelength spectrophotometer that incubates.

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What is new about LiMO? In three words - fewer moving parts - which makes for a smaller footprint than standard multi-sample spectrophotometers

LiMO

LiMO's key innovation comes from how it delivers heat and light to the biology with a 'flat' distribution using no moving parts (patent pending). So there are no hot spots and no shadows to contaminate and confuse the measurements of your biological sample.

And LiMO is designed to give you as much control over your measurement conditions as we can muster (patent pending). LiMO also provides you as much raw data as it can so you can remove artefacts, drive down noise and optimise your data analysis pipelines.

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Specs

  • weight : 1.5Kg
  • size : 22cm x 10cm x 17cm
  • materials : aluminium-plastic dibond casing, interior plastic parts, 6 LEDs, heating unit
  • wireless, ethernet (fixed IP) and bluetooth communication
  • GUI compatible with Mac OS, Linux and Windows

Software

LiMO's graphical user-interface (GUI) can be used to create protocols consisting of multiple phenotypic reads.

The GUI interacts with LiMO wirelessly or ethernet interfaces and it's compatible with Mac OS, Linux and Windows. Data analysis pipelines produce results on your computer in CSV, Excel and PDF formats.

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Data

If you need microbial growth curves and you determine, say, lag times, growth rates, dose responses, maybe you measure metabolic efficiencies, population densities or have to determine expression patterns of fluorescently-labelled genes of microbes ... if so then you will find the quality of LiMO's data to be competitive at a low price.

We could show you LiMO's microbial growth curves, but we think the following pictures provide a better snapshot of how LiMO performs against 3 brands of spectrophotometer on the current market.

 

LiMO's 'E.coli detection limit' measured using Ecoli K12 MG1655 that was repeatedly diluted from a dense culture until population density measurements achieved the same magnitude as their standard deviation (replicated 8 times). LiMO's limit for this is 3.5% of the culture density, plus-or-minus the red horizontal bar showing 95% C.I. of the mean. Notice how this is lowest limit of the 4 devices we tested in this way, the next best is at 6%, give or take.

LiMO-based analysis typical of the kind of phenotypic study we conduct in our lab. For this we plotted the growth rate of brewer's yeast against its population density, observing negative relationships between the two in four different lab media. This outcome is said to be a 'rate yield' tradeoff in the microbial literature and LiMO can find it.

 

ACCURATE

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LOW COST

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LIGHTWEIGHT

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LOW ENERGY

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Team

LiMO has been designed and made by a team of engineers, mathematicians, biologists and coders. The optimisations never stop and we are working to refine LiMO to accomodate new protocols all the time.

Prof Ivana Gudelj

CEO-funder
ERC fellow: evolutionary microbiology (mathmodexp)

Prof Rob Beardmore

Data
Mathematician: background in algorithms, dynamics & evolution

Dr Carlos Reding

Biology
Microbiologist: background in Python, molecular & data-driven biology

Pricing

LiMO-F

  • 96 well microplates
  • Variable light intensities
  • OD + 3 light wavelengths
  • Single reads only
  • No incubation
  • 1Y return to base
  • £XGet Started

LiMO-OD

  • 96 well microplates
  • Variable light intensities
  • OD only
  • Timed reads
  • Incubates to 37C
  • 1Y return to base
  • £YGet Started

LiMO F-OD

  • 96 well microplates
  • Variable light intensities
  • OD + 3 light wavelengths
  • Timed reads
  • Incubates to 37C
  • 1Y return to base
  • £ZGet Started
* Exemplar prices: discounts available for purchases of 3 machines or more