Kelsey Lamb is a senior research analyst and laboratory manager of food microbiology in a university lab. Her main research focuses on food products, normally with either spoilage organisms or with human pathogens that affect different food products.
Most of the testing that she carries out is primarily challenge studies or shelf-life studies, inoculating aroung 180 to 240 plates per day. Her lab tracks and traces any sort of bacterial pathogen but primarily focuses on their impact within the food industry. In other words, they are the guardians of their state's food safety.
IUL's technology has increased productivity and has streamlined Kelsey's microbiology workflow. With IUL's Eddy Jet 2W and the SphereFlash, they can provide faster results and save more time.
A technology upgrade: the Eddy Jet 2W
Kelsey Lamb highlights the upgrade they achieved by getting the Eddy Jet 2W: "We already useed the first model of the Eddy Jet and we loved it, we decided to reinvest and get the Eddy Jet 2W model. We have been working with it since."
Furthermore, the Eddy Jet 2W has become an educational piece because of its ease of use, it is a game-changer for the researchers but also for university students who may not have any sort of research experience: "It is very simple to just easily put the plates onto the spiral plater and say, okay, you know, this is almost self-explanatory, it is fairly easy to follow along what somebody has explained to you."
Eddy Jet 2W's main advantages
Here are some of the advantages of the Eddy Jet 2W that Kelsey Lamb has found:
- Time saver: cranking out a decent number of samples is always a tedious process, but with the Eddy Jet 2W, it is possible to speed up the procedure. Instead of plating the samples manually, the spiral plater allows us to save time
- Automaticity: the plating gets easier and more automated with the Eddy Jet 2W and avoids the hand plating
- User-friendly: the spiral plater operates with a simple method to enable those researchers and students without experience to use it without previous training. Even with products that can contain pathogens such as Listeria or Salmonella, Kelsey Lamb knows that working with the Eddy Jet 2W allows them to have the sample contained reducing the risk of work environment contamination. In Kelsey's words: "We treat every sample as if it has a potential pathogen in it. Up until we know that it does not. So just being able to have all that stuff contained within that unit and very easily dispose of those products afterwards and not have to worry about trying to re-clean tools, king of flush things out, it is very easy."
The automatic colony counter
In the past, most university researchers did the dilution manually, but now with the Eddy Jet 2W, they put everything on the plate and just let it run on the Eddy Jet.
Then, thanks to the automatic colony counter, they finish the process, counting the colonies present in a plate, in seconds: "Just to be able to put it on the plate and let it run on the Eddy Jet, it just makes it so much easier. And then reading the plate, just, I cannot tell you the amount of time that we are saving with the automatic colony counter! You know, even if you are getting some colonies or maybe some other things that are not quite showing up as well, being able to reset the lighting on there and look at sample a little bit differently [...] it's a very helpful, and time-saving technology that we utilize every day."
"We have just been very blessed to be able to utilize the technology of IUL and work with Neutec Group. It has been a game-changer for our whole lab because of the amount of time we are saving and the feasibility of its use" - Kelsey Lamb, senior research analyst