TeselaGen’s Plate Tools are designed to bridge experimental planning and execution, allowing you to efficiently organize, transfer, and replicate materials across plates. This article walks through key tools and concepts, including the use of the tools and the input and output files they work with. Before getting to know the tools and how to use them, it's important to get familiar with Plate Maps.

A plate map is a way to define the layout of materials within a plate. It specifies what is located in each well; the inside of a plate can contain different entities from your inventory: samples, reagent lots, or inventory items. Plate maps can be created directly in the platform or uploaded as a CSV file. There is an important concept not to get confused with: abstract and physicial entities. A plate map can either contain a physical or an abstract material.

Plate maps are used as the input for some tools to create an actual Plate. This means that the purpose of a map is to plan what is going to happen in the lab, so they allow you to design experiments in advance, even before physical samples exist. For this cases, we can place abstract entities on the plate map.

The Aliquot Rearray Tool allows you to select aliquots from one or multiple source plates and transfer them into a single destination plate, specifying volumes for each transfer. This tool is especially useful when you have several aliquots on different plates and you want to place them all in one place.

On a workflow, it can be used as a preparation step for liquid handlers, where a consolidated source plate is required. A Plate Map is required to indicate the specific layout of the output plate.

The Plate Reformatting Tool is designed for creating replicates of existing plates. Similar to the aliquot rearray tool, it can use more than one input plate, but this only generates replicated plates based on a defined number of copies and assigns a new barcode to each output plate.

The Aliquot Rearray Tool reorganizes specific wells into a single plate, while the Plate Reformatting Tool replicates entire plates. Although the Aliquot Rearray can be used to manually create replicates, the main difference is that it can only produce one output plate, while the Plate Reformatting can produce several ones.

Both tools can be combined on a workflow by using the Aliquot Rearray to consolidate materials from multiple plates into a single source plate, and then the Plate Reformatting to generate replicates of the consolidated plate for experimental use.