Listen to what Teresa Blakely at Oklahoma State University has to say about her PC 10 Media Preparator and PS900 Media Filler
0:21 – What motivated you to implement automation in the lab?
“Well when you have so many students and not enough employees or work study, hand pouring plates for oh my goodness… for these students every semester just becomes very arduous. Your daily focus is pouring plates, it’s not focusing on the bacteria that you need the culture or doing anything else.”
0:49 – How did the automation impact the work in the lab?
“It just, getting the Proficlave and the PetriSwiss 900, it was amazing. It’s just cut out s much time that we had to focus on pouring the plate”
1:10 – COVID-19
“Our spring semester was cut short because of the COVID. We just now opened a box of plates that I had made last December and there might have been 10 plates out of 500 that were bad. So, when it comes to contamination, this machine it just helps so much with that and it helps with the waste, we have so little waste. When we had to hand pour stuff we had, oh my gosh, our plates might last a semester maybe…. It’s is amazing how much this machine has cut out contaminants and the plates are still viable after all of these months.”
2:15 – What if you had to give it up and go back to manual methods?
“I would cry. We would just have to adjust and kind of go back to the old ways of making the agar putting it into the autoclave, getting it out, cooling it down, hand pouring it, you know, one plate at a time, and gosh, it would just be horrifying.”
2:40 – Safety
“Whenever you’re hand pouring plates, you know, you're dealing with number one autoclave, which are being pressured and we've had work study get burned, sticking their arms in the autoclaves, and just things happen. Then you talk about hot glass. If you don't have on, you know, the right thickness of gloves when your hand pouring. We've had students break the glass. We've had students get burned. All of that is just taken care of in the Proficlave that cools it down and then it comes over here to the PetriSwiss and pours and I just can't tell you what a lifesaver it is.”
3:54 – “I would recommend it 1000 percent, absolutely. It’s worth every penny.”