HoloPlating — Volumetric holographic imaging for rapid microbial colony detection on agar plates

HoloPlating is a new method for the rapid, automated, and accurate determination of microbial viability on agar plates — the universal gold standard for colony-forming-unit (CFU) enumeration across food safety, pharmaceuticals, clinical diagnostics, water monitoring, and biotechnology R&D. A new optical method will be developed for reading CFUs from agar plates at an early stage, which could achieve time-to-result improvements of 5–10× over the best current automated plate readers and 50–100× over standard manual protocols.