ColTapp (Colony Time-lapse application) is a user friendly tool implementing all image- and downstream analysis steps necessary to derive biologically relevant data from pictures of bacterial colonies growing on agar plates. ColTapp can automatically detect colonies and return their size and position as well as shape and color. In addition, it reports various metrics describing the proximity of neighboring colonies.
Importantly, users interested in monitoring colonies growth dynamics (i.e colonies appearance time and linear radial growth rate) can analyze time-lapse imaged agar plates with ColTapp. For users interested in colonies growth dynamics who have at their disposal only endpoint images from their plates (at timepoint e.g. 24h and 48h), ColTapp provides a framework to estimate colonies appearance time and linear radial growth rate.