UCLA

The monitoring of yeast cell concentration and viability is essential for beer-brewing and biofuel production industries. However, the current methods of measuring viability and concentration are relatively bulky, costly, and/or tedius. We have developed an Automatic Yeast Analysis Platform (AYAP) that performs portable, cost-effective, and rapid measurement of these conditions using a lensless microscope based on partially-coherent in-line holography. This microscope weighs 70 g, has dimensions of 4 � 4 � 12 cm, and communicates with a touch-screen user interface. The user interface utilizes a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification algorithm to automatically measure concentration and viability of yeast samples stained with methylene blue. AYAP’s measurements agreed well with gold-standard fluorescence-based manual counting measurements, demonstrating AYAP’s dynamic concentration range of 1.4�105 to 1.4�106 cells/mL. This range of cell densities is ideal for various fermentation-based industries.