Learn about the origins of the GrowthRates program, including the resulting published paper, which has been cited more than 300 times.

At a Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in 2012, Dr. Hall met a graduate student named Hande Acar and spent some time discussing her work in the lab at the Institute of Science & Technology Austria. She described the wonderful new microplate reader they were using to monitor the growth of bacterial cultures. The reader could automatically follow the growth of 96 cultures for hours, or overnight, and report the density of each culture at specified reading intervals. 

The problem that Hande encountered was that it took days to do the calculations that would turn the resulting raw data into useful growth rates.