Applications for Open Source Microplate-Compatible Illumination Panels.

Microplates are commonly used in the modern laboratory environment for a wide variety of tasks both in small-scale laboratory benchtop operations as well as large-scale high-throughput screening (HTS) campaigns. Though laboratory automation has greatly increased the utility of microplates there remain instances where automation-based instrumentation is not feasible, cost-effective or compatible with microplate formatting needs. In these cases, microplates must be manually prepared. Problematic to manual microplate manipulations is that a number of difficulties can arise pertaining to the accurate tracking of sample operations, data record keeping and quality control (QC) inspection for well artifacts or formatting errors. As microplate well densities increase (i.e., 96-well, 384-well, 1536-well) the potential for introducing errors also drastically increases.  Moreover, for small bench-top laboratory operations there exists a need to improve the ease and accuracy of sample handling in a cost-effective fashion. Herein, we describe a system that acts as a semi-automated pipetting guide referred to as the Microplate Assistive Pipetting Light Emitter (M.A.P.L.E.).  M.A.P.L.E. has multiple uses for supporting compound hit-picking and microplate preparation for assay development in high-throughput screening or laboratory benchtop operations, as well as QC/quality assurance (QA) diagnostic evaluation of microplate quality or visualizing well formatting errors.