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There's a commonly accepted convention for naming the wells in a 384-well-plate: 

A01..A24
B01..B24
..
P01..P24

It's concise and unambiguous and thus very useful. For 1536-well plates (32x48) it's more difficult because there's more rows than letters in the alphabet. It seems there's no standard. Which nomenclatures are out in the field and which is the best?

user829755
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  • could someone with more reputation than me create and add the tags screening and mtp? and maybe modify the tag hts so that it includes high-throughput-screening? – user829755 Apr 23 '18 at 07:07
  • Can you perhaps modify this such that it's on-topic here? As is, it seems neither directly related to bioinformatics nor a question with a best answer (the goal of the stackexchange network). – Devon Ryan Apr 23 '18 at 08:12
  • the goad is to find the most suitable scheme for naming well ids in a piece of bioinformatics software, so I don't really understand your concern. Is high-throughput-screening not a part of bioinformatics? – user829755 Apr 23 '18 at 08:29
  • Screening is relevant, but random "how do I label wells" questions aren't necessarily. – Devon Ryan Apr 23 '18 at 08:39
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    Looking into standards/conventions of how to organize biological data most certainly is relevant to bioinformatics, and best answers can be envisioned: "There is now standard X", "Commonly used convention Y", "There is none yet, but Z has proven useful". I'm glad this helpful question was not closed/deleted. – rvf Jan 14 '22 at 11:14

2 Answers2

2

Here's one way I found:

A01..A48
..
Z01..Z48
AA01..AA48
..
AF01..AF48

Pros:

  • Excel does it like that with columns
  • it's clear what's the row and what's the column

Cons:

  • alphabetic sorting of well ids does not what you want
  • when reading A01 it's not clear whether the plate size is 384 or 1536
user829755
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2

and here's a scheme I made up myself:

AA01..AA48
..
AZ01..AZ48
BA01..BA48
..
BF01..BF48

Pros:

  • alphabetic sorting of well ids does what you expect
  • it's clear what's the row and what's the column
  • it's easy to distinguish well ids of 384-well plate from those of a 1536-well plate

Cons:

  • it's not used anywhere AFAIK
user829755
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