Colony-forming assay is one of the most frequently used methods in stem cell biology. The of the main hurdles in colony assays is counting. It is very time consuming and very subjective. Automation of colonies count could significantly ease the methodology and increase its applicability.
Quentin Geissmann has published a description of his software for counting cell colonies – OpenCFU in PLoS ONE:
The aim of the present work is to provide a new tool to enumerate circular objects from digital pictures and video streams. Here, I demonstrate that the created program, OpenCFU, is very robust, accurate and fast.
It was not tested on stem/ progenitor cell colonies yet, but seem like it should work nicely for this purpose. The software can analyze colonies only from images or video. It will be very cool to invent automated counting device, which can do it right from a dish. So, your eyes will never hurt. If you can try OpenCFU on stem cell colonies, please send your feedback to author or post it in comment.
You can watch video tutorial here.
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Do not hesitate to send me pictures of stem/ progenitor cell colonies or to email me some feedback it would help me to improve the software.