All of our kits use 96-well plate formats. Likewise, our readers Mabtech IRIS and ASTOR are built for 96-well ELISpot and FluoroSpot plates. The reason for this is scientific: The wells of a 96-well plate are optimal in size for seeding enough cells to obtain reliable statistical results.
The well of a 384-well plate is about 1/5th the size of a 96-well plate. This means that you can only add 1/5th as many cells per well, for example, 50,000 instead of 250,000. With so few cells, the analysis and readout becomes tricky, especially when examining antigen-specific T and B cell responses, where spot numbers are generally low. Five times fewer cells results in five times fewer spots, so if you for example saw 50 spots in a 96-well plate, you’d only see 10 spots in the 384-well plate. In general, a lower number of spots per well leads to greater variation between replicate wells.
Thus, we have chosen not to develop the 384-well plate format because it generally results in too few cells to obtain reliable results.
384-well plates allow for too few cells to be seeded