Abstract: Systems, including methods and apparatus, for growing viable monoclonal colonies, identifying them as monoclonal after their viability has been demonstrated, and picking and placing them into a target environment. The methods may include plating cells at low density in a well, capturing at a first time shortly after plating a series of vertically spaced-apart images of the well showing locations of the cells, capturing at a second, later time images of the same well showing locations of candidate cell colonies, determining a likelihood that the candidate colonies are monoclonal based on information in the first set of images, and, based on the likelihood, picking candidate colonies using a picking head for transfer to a target environment.