11 August 2020 - - Pennsylvania, US-based The Penn State Microbiome Center and General Automation Lab Technologies are collaborating to advance plant pathology, environmental microbiology and human gut microbiome studies, the organisations said.

As part of this collaboration, GALT will support four research projects that will use the company's Prospector high-throughput microbial isolation and cultivation system to generate banks of live microbial isolates.

The isolates will be used in studies to develop a more detailed understanding in critical areas of microbiome research: how the microbiome causes different individuals to digest food differently, the microbial basis of disease in a major food crop, how to improve our ability to cultivate microbes from soil, and how the soil microbiome interacts with crop plants and influences crop productivity.

The GALT Prospector system is an array-based platform for microbiome research and product development that enables scientists to cultivate target microbes from complex samples using a massively scalable, easy-to-use workflow.

The system improves the capability and capacity of microbiome research laboratories to screen, isolate and analyze difficult-to-culture or less abundant microbes from complex microbiome samples.

The Penn State Microbiome Center supports transformative, interdisciplinary research in microbiomes by fostering long-term working relationships while simultaneously providing infrastructure and resources needed for increasing the diversity and breadth of microbiome research and educational opportunities at Penn State.

Units involved in the center include the colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Communications, Earth and Mineral Sciences, Engineering, Health and Human Development, Information Sciences and Technology, and Medicine, and the Eberly College of Science.

Also participating are the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the Social Science Research Institute, the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.

Active members also come from the Arts Design Research Incubator and from other Penn State campuses.

GALT, a privately held company based in Silicon Valley, is a developer of cultivation and screening platforms for microbiome research and microbial product development, addressing high-impact markets including human health, agriculture, environmental science, and microbial products for industrial use.