Designs for Bioassays with Plate Location Effects

by Brian Schlain, Hitendra S. Jethwa, Meena Subramanyam, Kevin Moulder, Bhavna Bhatt, and Michael Molloy Standard 96-well microplate assays are prone to edge and bowl effects. Such plate location effects can badly bias potency estimates. Easy-to-use plate layouts enable scientists to adjust estimates for such effects when analyzing new production drug batches. This article is indebted to the work reported by Russell Reeve (BioPharm, July 2000) and the subsequent letters from David Lansky and Reeve (BioPharm, September 2000).