Rational DOE protocols for 96-well plates

The use of 96-well plates for chemical and biological applications has rapidly increased as new applicable domains have been discovered and new laboratory instruments developed. There are 96, 384, 1536, etc. plates customized for diverse applications such as biological assays, sample preparation, solid-phase extraction and crystallization. Multi-pipettes as well as automated pipette systems accelerate the preparation of plates resulting in even faster evaluation systems. A bottleneck in the use of multi-unit plates is method development and optimization. By applying rational experimental design, the optimization could be made more efficient and less time-consuming. Unfortunately, the workload related to manual preparation of multi-unit plates according to an experimental design is often considered overwhelming. The present study introduces a new approach for experimental design in 96-well plates that minimizes the manual workload without compromising the quality of the experimental design. This approach is scalable to larger rectangular formats such as 384- and 1536-well plates. The optimal combinations will be delineated and applied experimentally to a reporter-gene assay.