Several types of assays use plate-based technologies where spots or beads of sample are arrayed across a fixed size plate and read by an instrument. Creating an assay design for a plate-based technology adds the creation of a plate template to the general assay procedure outlined in Design a New Assay or used in the Tutorial: Design a General Purpose Assay Type (GPAT). For a tutorial using a plate-based assay, see Tutorial: NAb Assay.

Recall that when you create an assay design, you name and optionally customize a specific instance of one of the built-in assay types. There are specific types for several plate-based instruments:

• Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA)
• Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Spot Assay (ELISpot)
• Neutralizing Antibody Assays (NAb)

Plate Templates

When you create any type of plate-based assay design, the assay properties section includes a place to specify the template used to map spots or wells on the plate to data fields. The dropdown list of available templates is populated by creating named templates in the folder, project, or shared project. A variety of pre-defined templates is available; even if you make no changes to the default, you must still create a new named version.

Now you can select the template you just defined when you create an assay design.

Edit Plate Templates

Detailed instructions on using the plate template editor can be found here:

• Edit Plate Templates

Plate-Based Assay Examples

For a detailed walkthrough of using a plate template, try one of these tutorials:

• Tutorial: ELISA Assay
• Tutorial: ELISpot Assay Tutorial
• Tutorial: NAb Assay