The present work describes the optimization of a short-term assay, based on the inhibition of the esterase activity of the alga Pseudokirchneriella subcapitata, in a microplate format. The optimization of the staining procedure showed that the incubation of the algal cells with 20 μmolL fluorescein diacetate (FDA) for 40 min allowed discrimination between metabolic active and inactive cells. Th...

Sugars and organic acids are important determinants of taste in fruits and vegetables. Based on the enzymatic analyses originally developed by Boehringer-Mannheim, rapid and reliable microplate-based assays were devised for glucose, fructose and sucrose in tomato and orange juice, and citrate and L-malate in tomato. These microplate assays were used to compare some commercially available tomato...

MICs of clarithromycin and amoxycillin for 253 isolates of Helicobacter pylori were measured by an air-dried microplate method and compared with the results obtained by the agar plate dilution method. The air-dried microplate method is performed by coating each well of a 96-well microplate with the test antibiotic and air-drying it. There were no marked differences between the air-dried micropl...

UV absorbance measurements in microplates became possible only five years ago when Molecular Devices (Sunnyvale, CA, USA) introduced the SPECTRAmax 250, the first UV-Visible microplate spectrophotometer. Microplates have since become very popular for making UV measurements of DNA, RNA and protein concentrations because of their higher throughput compared to traditional cuvettes. Despite their ...

High-content screening microscopy relies on automation infrastructure that is typically proprietary, non-customizable, costly and requires a high level of skill to use and maintain. The increasing availability of rapid prototyping technology makes it possible to quickly engineer alternatives to conventional automation infrastructure that are low-cost and user-friendly. Here, we describe a 3D pr...

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology research requires instrumentation to be both functional and versatile. In the HTS and Drug Discovery environments, microplate-based assays are developed to make determinations on large numbers of samples. Regardless of the assay protocol, the end result is the measurement by some sort of detection device. Towards that end, BioTek has developed Synergy HT Multi-D...