An issue in culturing HGM is the need to constantly maintain anaerobic conditions as are found in the gut. This is an area where the decreased hands-on time required for Prospector can beneficial. The Prospector instrument readily fits into an anaerobic chamber (Coy Lab Products and Anaerobe Systems) such that all steps–from array loading and sealing, incubation of the arrays, imaging of arrays for monitoring culture growth, transfer and sealing of metabolically active cultures in 96 well plates for scale up, and the incubation of these 96-well plates–can all be accomplished without samples ever leaving the chamber and without needing to manage dozens or hundreds of Petri dishes.