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Spin-down Tool

Adds extended properties to plates

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Written by Eduardo Abeliuk
Updated over a week ago

The Spin-down tool takes in one or more plates of microbial materials as input and validates that each well contains a microbial material. The tool outputs the same input plates and classifies the "Pellet" extended property as true for microbial material aliquots. The "Aspirated" extended property will also be classified as true for plates if the supernatant is discarded. When the extended property is classified as true it will be applied to the aliquot or plate. The user will also have the option of adding and removing additional extended properties at the aliquot and plate level.

You can find more detailed definitions of the terms mentioned in this article in the glossary.

Input: Plates of Microbial Materials

Output: Plates with Added Extended Properties

Prerequisites:

  • (required): the "Aspirated" extended property (of Class: basic and Type: flag) must be added to Plates.

  • (required): the "Pellet" extended property (of Class: basic and Type flag) must be added to Aliquots.

  • (required): plates should have microbial material and should not have dry wells.

Preparation

In order to test this tool, you will need a plate of microbial materials. If you do not have one at the ready, follow these steps:

  1. Create a tube of microbial material from an entry in your strain database. You can check out the help article Sequences, Materials, Samples, and Aliquots to learn how to do this from scratch.

  2. Create an empty generic 96 well plate. You can do this easily from Inventory > Plates > New Plate.

  3. From your tube of microbial materials, you can fill your empty plate with microbial materials following the instructions in the Plate Prep Tool help article.

You can find the ‘Spin-down’ tool under Tools > Tool Library. Click ‘Launch Tool’ to start using the tool.

The tool will walk you through a few steps to select samples and configure parameters before running. You need to complete each step before proceeding to the next. After completing a step, the completed step mark (circle) will turn green with a checkmark. You can always use the ‘previous’ button to go back to any previous step.

1. Select Plates: Click the button "Select Plates" to select one or more plates of microbial materials. Check the box below if you would like to discard the supernatant. If the supernatant is discarded, the 'Aspirated' extended property will be true for the plate.

After clicking on the "Select Plates" button, you will be presented will a list of plates that you can process. Select all the plates that you want to update, and click on the "Select Plates" button within the dialog window. In this case, we select a plate of microbial materials.

After selecting your plate(s) you should see the verification panel as follows.

Clicking on the 'eye' icon will give you preview of the plate.

2. Update Extended Properties: In this step, you will be able to update extended properties to the selected plates and their corresponding aliquots. An extended property of "Pellet" will be classified as true for each aliquot automatically. If you selected to discard the supernatant, an extended property of "Aspirated" will also be deemed as true for each plate. You can also add additional extended properties if desired.

Click on the ‘Submit’ button. You will then be notified that the Spin-Down tool has completed and that there is a link to the plate that stores the aliquots that were updated.

If you click on the link to the updated plate, you will be able to open it and see all the aliquots, with their corresponding extended properties that have been modified by this tool.

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