Co-cultures are fast becoming more widely researched, including with respect to industrial applications. In order to fully understand and, thence, optimise the growth of organisms in co-culture, it would be helpful to study that growth directly. In other words: to be able to monitor the growth rates of the individual constituents of a co-culture, as well as the total growth rate, without disturbing the system. There exist several methods of doing this, currently, though all have their shortcomings (as explained below). We designed our hardware and software with the intentions of distinguishing between organisms in situ and obtaining cell counts for a whole sample and each of its constituents. We feel that this offers at least some improvement over the existing analysis methods.

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