Enabling Data-Driven Strain Discovery Through Dynamic Clonal Monitoring and Parallelized Screening
eCyte is proud to introduce TolerScan -- Microbial Tolerance Screening System, a new platform designed to advance high-throughput microbial tolerance screening. Built on microfluidic technology, TolerScan integrates parallelized cultivation, dynamic clonal growth monitoring, tolerance assessment, and target clone recovery into a streamlined workflow, providing researchers with an efficient and traceable approach to identifying promising microbial strains.
Addressing a Critical Challenge in Industrial Biomanufacturing
As microbial technologies move from laboratory research toward industrial-scale production, the challenge is no longer simply whether a microorganism can grow, but whether it can maintain stable performance under complex and demanding production conditions.
Fluctuations in acidity, elevated temperatures, organic solvents, and osmotic stress can all challenge microbial performance during industrial fermentation. A strain's ability to withstand these stresses directly affects fermentation stability, production efficiency, and the feasibility of industrial applications.
Tolerance screening is therefore a critical step in industrial strain development, helping researchers identify robust microbial candidates capable of performing reliably under production-relevant conditions.
However, conventional screening workflows often depend on serial plating, manual observation, colony picking, and repeated validation. These approaches are labor-intensive and provide limited insight into the dynamic growth behavior of individual clones.
TolerScan addresses these challenges by combining microfluidic parallel cultivation, automated observation, and data-driven evaluation to help researchers identify promising tolerant clones from large microbial populations.
1. High-Throughput Parallelized Microfluidic Cultivation
TolerScan integrates sample processing, compartmentalized cultivation, and parallelized screening into a streamlined microfluidic workflow. Individual cells or clones are cultivated in independent microchambers, minimizing interference between different clones. Each chip supports the parallel cultivation and screening of approximately 1,000–5,000 individual cells or clones, enabling efficient evaluation of large microbial populations.
2. Dynamic Growth Monitoring and Tolerance Assessment
Using bright-field imaging, TolerScan monitors microbial growth and morphology throughout cultivation. Automated image recognition and clonal tracking generate individual growth profiles, capturing key parameters such as growth initiation, growth rate, and sustained growth. These data provide a more comprehensive basis for comparing clonal performance and evaluating tolerance under defined stress conditions.
3. Multi-Stress Screening for Diverse Microorganisms
TolerScan supports microbial tolerance screening under multiple environmental stresses, including acid, salt, solvent, metal-ion, and temperature stress. The platform is applicable to a broad range of microorganisms, including bacteria, yeasts, actinomycetes, dimorphic fungi, and other microorganisms capable of forming microcolonies under suitable cultivation conditions. This versatility supports diverse microbial screening and strain development needs.
4. Target Clone Identification and Recovery
By integrating growth analysis with tolerance assessment, TolerScan enables researchers to identify and locate promising clones based on their phenotypic performance. Target clones can then be recovered for downstream secondary screening, strain characterization, and application validation. This traceable workflow connects high-throughput screening with subsequent microbial strain development.
Supporting Diverse Microbial Screening Strategies
TolerScan is designed to support three major approaches to microbial strain discovery and development:
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Natural Strain Screening: Identify naturally occurring microorganisms with desirable tolerance phenotypes from environmental and microbial resources.
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Large-Scale Mutant Library Screening: Compare phenotypic diversity across extensive mutant populations to identify promising candidates.
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Adaptive Laboratory Evolution Screening: Track clonal growth performance during evolutionary processes and identify strains with improved stress adaptation.
From environmental isolates to engineered strains and serially passaged populations under graded stress, TolerScan helps researchers identify promising candidates faster and more efficiently.
Expanding eCyte's Technology Portfolio
From FlowRACS high-throughput Raman-activated cell sorting and DCP digital clone picking to RAMS Raman-activated microfluidic single-cell sorting, eCyte continues to advance technologies for single-cell functional analysis, precision sorting, clonal screening, and process monitoring.
The addition of TolerScan further extends eCyte's portfolio into dynamic microbial tolerance screening, connecting candidate discovery and phenotypic evaluation with downstream strain validation.
By making microbial phenotypes more observable and promising strains easier to identify, eCyte is committed to providing innovative tools that support microbial resource discovery, strain development, and biomanufacturing innovation.
Working alongside global research and industry partners, eCyte will continue to advance original technologies and instrumentation to address emerging challenges in life sciences and biomanufacturing.
TolerScan — Among Thousands, Find Those That Thrive.