High-level instructions are an easy-to-understand set of steps presented to you in relatable plate maps. The instructions help to validate that your experiment design for liquid handling automation or manual execution is doing what you intended without getting bogged down in the weeds of specific device details. Or maybe you are designing and planning an experiment to run in the lab manually with pipettes and want an easy-to-follow, intuitive set of instructions to guide you through your experiment steps.

High-level Instructions provide an intimate link between your experimental design and the liquid handling steps that get planned. The scientific context provided in your workflows through use of element groups and the elements themselves are surfaced to the Instructions, allowing you to identify which specific elements from a step in your workflow generated the liquid handling actions you intend to carry out. This makes it easier to understand if something is wrong with your experiment plan, which element within the workflow might be the cause of the problem.

In this article you will learn how to:

Generating High-Level Instructions is as easy as that!

By using element groups and element renaming to provide scientific context to your workflow, Synthace now brings that scientific context to the instructions. You can now more easily identify which specific element generated a set of liquid-handling steps. This can help in validating if your workflow is doing what you intended, and if not, which element may have the wrong behaviour.

High-level instructions are visual plate maps to help either direct the liquid handling you need to carry out in the lab with pipettes or to help validate that your workflow is doing what you expect.

The plate maps are destination plates only, showing you which liquid(s) and what volumes need to be pipetted into the wells of a specific named plate.

The simplest case is for Aliquoting, where you will be shown the names of the liquids and the volume that should be transferred to the wells.

For dilution cases, you will be presented with two plate maps, one for the diluent and a second to show how the intended sample should be handled.

Note: For serial dilutions where you need to sample from a previous well, you will be shown the name of the liquid, the target concentration achieved, the volume you need to transfer, and from which well you need to transfer from.

When making mixtures or mixing liquids into wells that already contain samples, you will get multiple plate maps with the liquids broken up into layers. The liquid handling described across all the plate maps is required to achieve the final defined mixtures.

For example, if you were mixing three liquids together in different proportions to hit specific concentrations along with a diluent, you would get the following plate maps.

When normalizing samples, for example, to a fixed concentration, you will get the relevant plate maps showing where and how much diluent is required and how much sample to add to hit the target concentration.

Click on the Dilution Table tab at the top of a normalization instruction step and you will get a normalization table that will show all the volumes calculated to achieve the target concentration.

The Pause and Prompt element can be used to provide a user-specific instruction.

The Incubate element will generate an instruction step that presents the incubation settings that were defined in the workflow, along with plate maps for all the plates that need to be incubated. In this case, the metadata shown in the wells of the plate map are the final conditions prior to incubation.

The Run Plate Reader element will generate an instruction step that presents the plate reader protocol that was defined in the workflow, along with any other plate reader-specific settings and plate maps for all the plates that need to be measured. In this case, the metadata shown in the wells of the plate map are the final conditions prior to incubation.

The Wash Plates element will generate an instruction step that presents the plate washing protocol that was defined in the workflow, along with any other plate washing specific settings and plate maps for all the plates that need to be washed. In this case, the metadata shown in the wells of the plate map are the final conditions after washing.

Note: The volumes in the wells are 0 ul after having washed them.

That’s it! Well done for making it to the end of this tutorial.