eCyte, Inc., in an effort to revolutionize high-throughput cultivation and screening of microbes in complex communities, has developed a microfluidic instrument in collaboration with Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, CAS, and Hubei University. The AI-powered Digital Colony Picker (DCP) platform provides a novel technical solution for highly parallel cell cultivation, phenotypic screening, and recovery of clones in microbiome and synthetic microbial population, and, in a publication in Nature Communications, successfully achieved high-throughput screening based on both growth and functional phenotypes.