Evaluation of liquid handling conditions in microplates.

Liquid handling in higher density microplates (e.g., 1536-well microplates) for more efficient drug screening necessitates carefully selected and optimized parameters. The quality of a liquid handling procedure is dependent on the carryover rate of residual liquids during the pipetting process, the mixing behavior in the wells, foam and bubble formation, and evaporation. We compared and optimized these parameters in 96-, 384-, and 1536-well microplates, and herein we critically evaluate the performance of the CyBi-Well 96/384/1536 automated micropipetting device, which formed the basis of our evaluation studies.