Analysis of Cell Arrays: A Tool for Evaluation of High Density Micro Colony Chips in Fluorescence Assays

Generation of highly active, specific and enantioselective biocatalysts is of increasing interest for industrial processes. That leads to the necessity of reliable high throughput screening methods suitable for the desired enzyme reaction. A new approach is the screening of whole cell arrays where no decomposition of cells and further cleaning steps are required. For calculation of the kinetic properties of every single cell colony (spot) a software tool was developed. The main task was the segmentation of the spots. The spot segmentation was done using the mean shift algorithm. To obtain starting points the regular grid was coarsely filled using the radon transform. The results show that the method is suitable for a wide variety of regular spot arrays.