One of our customers was having problems identifying a single (correct) well in frozen 384 well microplates and asked us to build a system that would take the guess work out of recovering precious specimens from the selected well.  Although it is relative easy to do with 96 well microplates it is much harder on the 384 well microplates especially if the letters and numbers are covered with frost. The V&P Scientific 384 Well Microplate Indexer solves that problem very simply.

The V&P Scientific Microplate Indexer works by placing the microplate into a nest and simply adjusting the vertical and horizontal sliders to the Row Letter and Column Number of the well you wish to sample.  This places the selected well over a very bright red Light Emitting Diode (LED) and provides a simple visual indicator. 

The LED is bright enough to be seen through even   polypropylene microplates such as the Whatman Polyfiltronics plate seen on the pictures to the right.

Even deep well microplates filled with colored media are identifiable with our LED.  The Whatman/Polyfiltronic 384 deep well microplate below has 300 ul of colored media and the LED is still visible.

The LED on the V&P Scientific Microplate Indexer can also be seen through frozen cultures.  The photo to the right is of a frozen stock in a Nalge Nunc polystyrene 384 well microplate.  Although you can see LED through the culture, the LED light also is transmitted through the clear side walls of the well.  Thus even if the media were completely opaque the proper well is indicated through the LED shining through the well walls.

The V&P Scientific Microplate Indexer has a hinged brace on the back so you can adjust the angle of the plate to be perpendicular to your eye for easy sighting down into the well without placing your head vertically over the plate and contaminating it.  With this angle feature and because the LED is under the microplate instead of on top, it makes maintaining a sterile environment easy. 

The VP 150 Microplate Indexer is 30 cm wide, 25 cm deep and 4 cm tall. It weighs 2.3 kilo grams and is powered by 2 AA 1.5 volt batteries.  It is constructed using easy to clean acrylic and delrin components.

Our next indexer will be for the 1536 well microplates.  Keep watching this site or call us if you need to locate individual wells in a 1536 clear or translucent microplate. 

V&P Scientific 384 well microplate Indexing System. VP 150