Building microfluidics devices
One of the core activities of biotechnology is screening. In order to test large numbers of cells, gene constructs, drugs, or proteins, scientists must test a huge number of possibilities. Historically, this has largely been done using plate-based screening. In this method, scientists use plates with 96, 384, or 1,536 wells arrayed in a rectangle (these are standard plate formats used in the field) to test small volumes of sample on a robotics platform.
Plate-based screening, also called High-Throughput Screening (HTS), suffers from numerous issues:
- By their nature, plates contain bulk cells; therefore, they aggregate the behavior of many different cells.
- Plates can suffer from dehydration and other artifacts.
- Plates must undergo careful normalization for row and column effects.
- Plates must be normalized against each other to control for batch effects.
- Plates can suffer from edge effects; see Mansoury et al., The edge effect...
