Low-volume filling of microplate wells using vibration

Smaller fluid samples can offer higher sensitivity under analysis and allow more samples from a sparse specimen. However, for a microplate well there is a minimum volume requirement arising from the need for the fluid/air interface to make contact only on the walls of the well, a condition which allows high-quality undistorted optical imaging due to the minimum curvature of this interface. In this work, mechanical vibration is investigated as a method to significantly decrease this minimum volume requirement. Furthermore, low-frequency excitation is shown to be ideal for handling multiple wells (such as in a microplate) simultaneously.