The microplate market:Layout 1

monplace of all disposable labware. Its most common format consists of 96 individual wells arranged in eight rows and 12 columns with dimensions defined by the American National Standards Institute1 through an initiative sponsored by the Society for Biomolecular Sciences in 1996. There are a myriad of microplate types, including different well densities from several wells to several thousand wells per microplate; coloured microplates for different optical readouts (ie black for fluorescence; white for luminescence); solid bottom wells or clear bottom wells for topor bottom-reading fluorescence, respectively; different plastics (polystyrene, polypropylene, etc); various coatings (ie reduction of non-specific binding, tissue-culture treated, etc) and so on. The annual global market for microplates is approaching $500 million globally and dominated by several large companies such as Corning, Greiner Bio-One, NUNC and a large number of smaller companies focusing on specialty products or microplates designed for specific applications. In addition to this market, peripheral markets focus on the provision of instrumentation, in the form of liquid handling devices and microplate readers, specifically designed to use microplates as analysis vessels. The liquid handling market encompasses a wide range, from hand-held pipettors that can address either individual or multiple wells simultaneously to semito full-automation solutions that dispense multiple reagents and/or aspirate contents from full columns of microplate wells or complete microplates simultaneously. This market is slightly larger than the microplate market itself and is estimated to be $600 million. Numerous companies provide products into this market including Tecan, Eppendorf, Mettler-Toledo, PerkinElmer and Beckman Coulter. Microplate readers range from single mode detection devices akin to the first absorbance readers that appeared on the market more than 30 years ago to highly sophisticated multi-mode readers capable of performing absorbance, luminescence and a wide range of fluorescence-based modes including intensity, fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), time-resolved fluorescence (TRF), the variant TR-FRET and fluorescence polarisation. Some readers have been designed to process microplates in a matter of seconds for applications such as high throughput drug screening. This market is slightly smaller than the microplate market at about $300 million. The top five companies in this market are PerkinElmer, Inc, Thermo Fisher Scientific, MDS Analytical Technologies, Tecan and BioTek Instruments, Inc. By Dr Peter Banks