Plate geometry matters in Tecan!
Christine and I have been using the present Corning 24-well plate definition in the Tecan for our experiments so far. Yesterday I placed a pnc-Si chip in the (approximate) middle on the bottom of 1 of the 24-wells. I did a 500nm absorbance scan in a circular pattern (15×15 points) – to get data similar to the imaging post. Here’s the image I got:
In pseudocolor:
Obviously, it looks like the pnc-Si chip is off center. A neat thing about the Tecan is that you can define new plate geometries. So, I input the gross dimensions of our BD Falcon plates and set up a measurement. The Tecan scans the bottom of the unknown plate and returns the approximate well positions (that you then finely tune manually). I rescanned the same pnc-Si well as above with this new plate geometry and found:
In pseudocolor:
The low absorbance values are now perfectly centered!
The bottom line is that we have mainly BD plates in the lab so anyone who uses the Tecan for multiwell measurements must define a new plate geometry.
In addition to sounding caution to those using different plates, it is nice to see this advertised feature at work. This should allow us to make membrane arrays of our own format, and have the TECAN define them as custom ‘plates’ automatically.