The problem with manual pipetting
Pipetting large sample sets into 96- or 384-well plates is exacting work. One moment of distraction — a phone call, a colleague's question, losing your place in the list — and a sample ends up in the wrong well, one position off from where it should be. This is one of the most frustrating errors in the lab: it is silent, it triggers no alarm, and by the time you discover it the plate may already have been processed downstream.
A challenge common across many workflows
The problem is particularly acute in array-based workflows, where well plates are fed to a microarray robot that spots samples onto slides or membranes. The robot applies a spatial transformation to the well plate layout when printing, so the pattern of compounds on the final array is not a direct copy of the plate — it is rotated, mirrored, or both. A misplaced sample therefore produces an anomaly in the array that is difficult to trace back to its source, especially since sample spots are normally invisible until probed. Tracking down such an error means reasoning backwards through both the transformation and the pipetting record.
But the same risk applies to any workflow downstream of filling a microtiter plate — genomics, drug discovery, diagnostics, and any analysis that depends on knowing exactly which sample is in which well.
Pipetting accurately gets an order of magnitude more challenging with 384-well plates. The wells are small, closely spaced, and counting rows and columns by eye across a full plate is where errors creep in.
How WellSpot helps
WellSpot turns your iPad into a pipetting guide. Place the well plate directly on the screen inside the on-screen guide rectangle. WellSpot reads your sample list and — one sample at a time — calls out the sample ID and illuminates the target well from below, through the plate. You see exactly where to pipette. No cross-referencing a spreadsheet. No counting rows and columns. No second-guessing.
If you catch an error immediately, you can backtrack to the previous well and correct it before moving on.
Who it's for
WellSpot is used wherever samples need to be distributed across a well plate accurately and reproducibly. It is particularly valuable for:
- Sample sets of 50+ wells where manual tracking becomes error-prone
- 384-well plates where the wells are small and closely spaced
- Microarray production workflows where the printed pattern is a spatial transformation of the plate layout
- Sample sets that span multiple plates
- Labs where several team members share pipetting duties
Simple to set up, nothing to install on your computer
There is no software to install on a lab computer. You create a plain-text .well file — a tab-separated list of sample IDs and well coordinates — in any text editor or spreadsheet, and transfer it to the iPad via iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or email. The app works fully offline once the file is loaded.
See the help page for full details on the file format and how to get started.