With the system you can:

• Obtain 10 – 50X more viable monoclonal colonies
• Grow single cells in a flask-like environment, without physically separating them, eliminating perturbation to cell physiology and ensuring viability and vitality of single cells as they develop into clones
• Identify cells of interest using powerful, label-free brightfield analysis software with user-defined parameters
• Automatically and gently isolate CellRafts containing cells or colonies of interest for downstream endpoint analysis or clonal expansion
• Create a complete image-based record of all clones to support regulatory submissions

CellRaft Air® Technology

The CellRaft Air® System is an integrated platform that uses proprietary technology to maintain cells in an unperturbed state, leading to improved viability of single cells, highly proliferative colonies, and superior clonal outgrowth, that provides a dramatic increase in the number of clones available for downstream applications.

CellRaft Technology

The CellRaft technology is an entirely new and seamless way of enabling cell culture, analysis, and isolation that goes beyond trypsinization and dispensing a single cell into a well. This unique method for developing monoclonal colonies from single cells uses three components (1) a CellRaft Array comprised of CellRafts (2) CellRaft Cytometry™ software and (3)  CellRaft AIR, an integrated platform that incorporates rapid imaging, software-guided identification, and automated isolation.

What is a CellRaft?

The key to the technology is the CellRaft Array, a novel proprietary tissue culture dish containing thousands of microscale cell culture growth surfaces called CellRafts. Each CellRaft is housed within an individual microwell, allowing for gravity-based separation of a population into single cells. Despite being spatially separated in the microwells, the novel design of the array allows the entire cell population to share a contiguous media volume, which leads to improved viability and proliferation of single cells compared to other single-cell culture methods. The cells are cultured while attached to the CellRaft for the entire duration of the experiment, with no need for dissociation or sorting to recover the validated clones.

Cell Line Development

Traditionally, a limiting dilution method is used to isolate and generate single cell-derived clones, which is both time and cost prohibitive due to low efficiency of success and the manual labor input required to successfully generate a useful cell line. Several automated technologies exist that aim to improve the efficiency of single cell or colony isolation, such as FACS, colony pickers, and droplet dispensers, but they often reduce cell viability due to harsh manipulation and stress on cells that are forced through fluidic systems or to grow alone in a large volume of media.