McLane Research Laboratories has reached a milestone with the sale of an Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) to Michigan based company PhycoTech. While McLane has been selling the IFCB to academic institutions since 2013, the sale to PhycoTech marks the first to a commercial entity. PhycoTech, an environmental consulting company located in St Joseph, MI specializes in aquatic analyses.
Dr. Ann St. Amand, the president of PhycoTech and an expert in the industry with 30 years of identification experience, states that the instrument will be used to identify freshwater algae, especially HAB samples. Dr. St. Amand remarks, “I’ll be using the IFCB to hopefully serve customers that I can’t serve by manual counts.”
In addition, McLane announces recent sales of the IFCB to University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Massachusetts, and University of Maine. UC Santa Cruz is planning a deployment of two IFCBs in San Francisco Bay. One will be used for shipboard operations on the R/V Polaris, and another will be moored on a platform in the South Bay. Lead PI Dr. Raphael Kudela states, “If the relevant agencies are satisfied with IFCB performance, these instruments will become part of the next-generation monitoring network in San Francisco Bay.”
McLane representatives plan a live demonstration of the IFCB at Stand A23 during Ocean Business 2015 (14-16 April) at Southampton, UK. The McLane IFCB exhibit will be showcasing a continuous stream of images from local water, in addition to information on the company’s full line of samplers, profilers, and flotation.
McLane’s IFCB rugged design was developed specifically for the in-situ imaging of phytoplankton in an aquatic environment. The instrument uses flow cytometric and video technology to capture high resolution images and optical data of suspended particles in-flow. With a sample rate of 15mL/hour, the IFCB may generate up to 30,000 high quality images in one sampling hour.
A live time-series stream of millions of images from an IFCB deployed in-situ at the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory from 2006 to present can be seen at the IFCB Dashboard. New images are uploaded to the cloud-based platform every two hours. In addition, the IFCB Dashboard contains images from a number of missions ranging from a shipboard application on a NASA cruise in the Arctic to a deployment at HAB sensitive Salt Pond on Cape Cod. Dr. Heidi Sosik of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the co-inventor of the instrument, developed the Dashboard to share this library of IFCB images.
(Press release issued 9 April 2015)
