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Tutorial - Plate Creation From Rack

Introduction

In this tutorial, you will create plates from racks by transferring vial contents. The source racks and target plates must have the same format. Samples will be picked from all vials in the racks and put in the corresponding wells, the samples layout in the plate will correspond to the vials layout in the rack at the moment of the picking. In this tutorial, you will be guided to create 96-well plates from a set of 96-vials racks. You can of course use other plate and rack formats for this workflow.

Prerequisite

Required permissions and setup

Sample Processing role is required to access this workflow.

Required system configuration:

  • Container Types: Greiner PP96V and 1 Dram Vial,
  • Container Usage Inventory,
  • Solvent DMSO,
  • Worklist Generator and Parser: Standard (Container) (;),
  • Location Mask: 96

Those should exist by default in Sample application.

Items

Containers and Locations created from Discngine Sample’s automation will be used:

  • racks 96 (with 80 vials 1000 uL – 10 mM).
  • Location Paris Automation is running during installation if “example_dataset” is set to true in the configuration file.

Workflow

Job Initialization

Create a new job and select the Plate Creation from Rack workflow.

Requesting

  • Set Target Plate Barcode as Generate New Barcode.
  • Select Greiner PP96V as the Target Plate Type.
  • Specify Request from Text.
  • Copy and paste the rack names in the text area: R00001:R00002:R00003:R00004:R00005 (rack names can be separated by colons or line breaks).
  • Click Add IDs to confirm. The racks are listed in the added requests.
  • Click Next.

Task Requesting

  • Choose Source Selection Mode = All sources
  • Select Target Usage = Inventory
  • Select Number of Copy = 1
  • Target Volume = 30 μl
  • Dilution = Target
  • Dilution Mode = Dilution Factor
  • Dilution Factor = 10
  • Buffer (Solvent) = DMSO
  • Offset Volume = 0 %
  • Offset Solvent = 0 %
  • Click Add Task. 1 task is added.
  • Click Next.

Sourcing

The Sourcing page will confirm that the requested operations are compatible with the source batches (information in the Sourced column).

  • Click Next.

Processing

For processing, requested tasks are translated into a worklist that you can feed to your robotic equipment.

  • Select the Standard (Container) (;) equipment and File Order By Request
  • Click Generate worklist

A worklist file appears in the Worklist Generator area. It contains the requested tasks to execute. The Worklist Parser area expects a file containing the information about the tasks that were actually completed. By default, the generated file is set in the Worklist Parser. For this tutorial, we assume that every task was completed successfully so we’ll keep this default file.

  • Click the Copy Worklist button.
  • Click the Next button to propagate those changes in the system. The tasks are processed in the Sample application.

Storing

The Storing step allows you to assign a location to the items involved in the job. First, for the output plates (plates created during the job).

  • Click the Assign Location to Selected button.
  • Select Paris and click the Select button to confirm your choice.
  • Click the Next button to continue to the input racks. (Here, we won’t change the input racks' location.)
  • Click the Next button. You can increment the Thawing Cycle count of the input racks if necessary.

Pipe & Close

The Pipe & Close step provides a summary page where you can review the job and optionally pipe it to another workflow. You can also pipe this job to another one, allowing you to immediately start a new job using the output or the input plates from this one.

For this tutorial, click the Close & Quit button to finish the job.