For some applications, it can be important to be able to define regions of plates that allow you to assign specific liquids or types of liquids to the desired locaiton. In Synthace it might be that you have two different elements each contributing a different set of liquids to the same assay. However, when you have a situation where you don't know how many samples you have each time you run your workflow, and you want that workflow to scale appropriately such that control samples are added to every new plate Synthace creates then follow this tutorial.
Get started
Read the introduction to this series of tutorials, then complete all of the previous tutorials in the series. For more information, click here.
Create a copy of the workflow that you created in Core elements tutorial 2.5. To learn how, click here.
Rename the copy Core elements tutorial 2.6. To learn how, click here.
Background
In Core elements tutorial 2.5, we built a workflow that had a set of samples being aliquot on triplicate to an assay plate with a Control being aliquot in triplicate to the same plate.
However, if the number of samples we have specified increases from 24 to 48, the result would be the following.
The samples have filled all the wells in the well set on the first plate and overflow onto a second plate instance in our Assay Plate plate set. However, our control samples are still only transferred in triplicate to the first plate. We could increase the Replicates to 6 manually, but this doesn’t scale well on a case per case basis where you would need to calculate how many plates you have to know how many replicates of controls you need.
Here we will show you how you can scale the controls to multiple plates when they are required without needing to calculate a new number of replicates.
Replicating an element's actions to all plates of a plate set
Open the parameters for the Aliquot 2 element instance and in the Layout Options parameter group switch the Replicate To All Plates In Plate Set toggle to the on position.
Simulate the workflow
Check that the device that you selected can follow the instructions that you prepared. To learn how, click here.
Preview the execution
After you simulate the workflow, click View Simulation to open the simulation details.
Open the Preview tab, then click through the steps to check that the instructions that Synthace has generated are correct.
Notice here that Synthace has created two Assay Plates, AssayPlate-1 and Assay Plate-2, to satisfy the request for the number of aliquots of samples in triplicate. However, now there are two plates in the Assay Plate plate set, telling Synthace to Replicate To All Plates In Plate Set in the Aliquot 2 element instance now means that 3 replicates of the Control liquid are made to both plates and not just one.