Talk:Multiwell plate

Multiwell plate, vs microplate, vs reservoir?
Starting this redirect page & talk page, to potentially structure the multiwell plate, vs microplate, vs reservoir conundrum on Wikipedia (and elsewhere, like on Wikidata).

The way I see it:
 * There are the ANSI/SLAS microplate standards, that define what a microplate is.
 * If your physical labware item, follows just the ANSI/SLAS footprint standards, but has a number of wells that follows ~96*(4^x) (i.e. 384, 1536 wells), the per well volume is still in the ~µL range, so makes sense to call these microplates.
 * But if your physical labware item follow just the ANSI/SLAS footprint standards, has a # of wells that follows ~96/(4^x) (i.e. 24, 6 wells), the per well volume is now well greater than 1000 µL, so, IMO, it makes more sense to call them "multiwell plates" rather than "microplates".
 * If you start merging rows or columns of wells in a given "multiwell plate", then you start to get into "reservoir" territory. It may not be a multi-well plate, as it might just have "1-well". But it is still a "close relative" of a 100% standard SLAS/ANSI microplate.

I feel all these things should be ontologically well defined. See here for some Wikipedia external discussion: https://github.com/Bioprotocols/labware-databank/issues/9

Photocyte (talk) 19:02, 17 July 2023 (UTC)