Managing evaporation for more robust microscale assays. Part 1. Volume loss in high throughput assays.

Evaporation is a well known issue when handling small liquid volumes. Here we present a review of microscale assays prone to evaporation and methods to make them more robust. Applications for these assays span from combinatorial chemistry to cell-biology where the stability of concentrations and osmolarity can be critical. A dimensionless evaporation number Ev is presented and used to characterize volume loss in short term and long term microscale assays. Ev can be used both as a design tool and as an analysis parameter. The advantageous use of evaporation in some applications is also discussed.