Microbial growth assays using microtiter plate readers are commonly used in the biopharmaceutical industry for screening media components. These assays can generate large amounts of data very quickly; thus, automated approaches to the de-bottleneck the data analysis step are critical to enable faster decision making. At Kerry, retrieving, cleaning, and formatting the growth assay data is a manual process that is time-consuming and error-prone.

In this work, a series of scripts were created to improve the data analysis approach by automating data formatting, clean-up and visualization. JMP’s workflow builder and add-in builder were used to capture scripts and create an easy-to-use, click-based approach to reduce data analysis time and automate redundant analyses for high-throughput microbial growth assays. The add-ins reduced data analysis time by 80% from 20 to 4 minutes per raw data file. Add-ins will be made publicly available for other JMP users needing to de-bottleneck their data retrieval, clean-up, and analysis for high-throughput microtiter plate assays.