Plate Layout Designer New

Works without logging in

Open /tools/plate("Plate designer" in the toolbox). No account is needed.

1. Choose Plate format: 6, 12, 24, 96 or 384 wells. When you switch to a smaller format, wells outside the new plate are cleared and you are told how many.
2. Drag across the plate to select wells. Click a row or column header to select the whole row or column, and hold Shift or ⌘ to add to the selection.
3. With wells selected, set Sample, Condition and Note on the right. You can create samples and conditions on the spot, and each gets its own color. You can switch the coloring between sample, condition and result at any time; result coloring shows the normal, abnormal or discarded marks you set on the wells. Notes stay with the layout.
4. Undo steps back one change. "Clear plate" needs a second click to take effect.

Fill a dilution series

Select a range on the plate, then open "Fill concentrations by gradient". Enter the drug or reagent name, the unit, the highest concentration and the dilution factor, and choose one concentration per column or per row. The preview lists each concentration; click the apply button and every column (or row) becomes its own concentration condition. For example, on a 96-well plate, selecting B3 to G10 and filling by column gives 8 concentrations.

Export

• Table CSV: one row per well with sample, condition, result and observation. Copy it into Excel or the plate layout of your reader software.
• Label text: one line per well that has been set, ready to paste into label printer software.
• Download image: a PNG in the coloring currently shown on the plate.

The draft stays on this device

Until a plate is linked to an experiment, the layout is kept only in this browser. It is lost if you switch devices or browsers or clear browser data. To keep it, link it to an experiment or export it first. If the browser does not allow saving drafts, the page warns you that closing it will lose the layout.

Link to a sub-experiment

1. After logging in, pick an experiment and sub-experiment under "Link to a Vara experiment" and click Link. You can sign up for free if you have no account.
2. Once linked, changes you make here are saved automatically into the experiment, and the page shows Saved, Saving or Save failed.
3. If the plate was changed somewhere else (another tab or device), you see "This plate was changed elsewhere. Refresh before editing". Refresh loads the latest layout from the experiment and never overwrites the other change.
4. A sub-experiment holds at most 10 plates. You can unlink at any time; this device keeps a copy and the one in the experiment stays.
5. The sub-experiment page has a "Plates" section listing all its plates, where you can edit or delete one (delete needs a second click).

Record the result of each well

You can mark each well as normal, abnormal or discarded and add an observation, for example "bubble in the well", without logging in. Results and observations belong to that one run; notes are the part that stays with the layout. Saving the results as a run log needs a login and a plate linked to a sub-experiment.

1. After marking, choose the outcome of the run under "Record this run", add an overall observation, and click the save button.
2. The run log gets the result of every well, and a plate result image is attached to it automatically, colored by condition with the marked results drawn on it. The marks on the plate are cleared after saving, so the next run starts fresh.
3. The run log shows a one-line summary (how many wells were normal, abnormal and discarded) and lists the abnormal and discarded wells. The result image is an ordinary attachment and can be used in result image comparison; see Runs & Result Figures.

Ask Vara AI to lay out a plate or record results

In a sub-experiment, tell Vara AI what you need, for example "lay out a 96-well plate with 3 samples, 4 concentrations, 3 replicates each, PBS in the outer ring". Vara AI shows a card with a preview of the plate.

• Nothing is written to the experiment until you click Apply. You can also open it in the toolbox and keep editing yourself, or ignore it.
• After applying you can undo: a plate that was added is removed, and a plate that was changed goes back to how it was.
• When it changes an existing plate, the card shows the current layout and the layout after applying side by side.
• To record results, say something like "B2 to B4 are abnormal, C5 is discarded, the rest are normal". The card lists the number of wells in each category, and nothing is recorded in the run until you confirm. If a well is not on the plate, the card points to which entry, and you ask Vara to fix it first.
• Vara AI can also read the plates already on a sub-experiment, so you can ask which wells are controls or which wells were abnormal last time.

The same rules apply when an external AI lays out a plate through a connector; see the MCP & API reference.