Picowell plates

Massively parallel analysis or high throughput screening allows the parallel handling of several hundred to up to billions of assays or samples within one run, and performs an according readout for each assay in parallel. Main application examples are microarrays, bead based assays and picowell-plates. 

Picowell plates [288, 289] consist of millions of small wells (<50 pm in diameter) (Fig. 18c). In each well, either one chemical compound or one single cell is deposited. After the deposition, the picowell plate acts as a microarray with each position bearing a unique chemical compound or cell. Afterwards, all assays are performed similar to a microarray. 

Here, the microfluidic actuation principles that are utiziled in massively parallel analysis are outlined briefly. This is followed by some commercial application examples. Due to the similar principle, microarrays and picowell plates are presented together, followed by bead based assays. 

The company 454 Life Sciences offers picowell plate systems for the performance of massively parallel gene sequencing [289]. Beads containing... 

Today, many manual steps and skilled personnel are required for the described systems and a real microfluidic platform is still not reached. However, microarrays, picowell plates and bead based assays are a very useful combination of solid phase and liquid handling for massively parallel assays in the number of millions. The material consumption per assay is quite low and the reaction time quite fast. The time-to-result is longer compared to a single assay, but several magnitudes faster compared to serially performing the same number of assays. 

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