Spotting

With FluidFM you can deliver fL amounts of liquid in both air and liquid environment. The spotting workflows allow you to spot fL droplets on your sample in the pattern of your choice.

!!! Note In air, the involved volumes depend highly on the surface chemistry of your sample, the surface of your probe and properties of the spotted liquid.

There are two workflows available.

Spotting Workflow

This workflow processes the spotting positions defined and applies the same spotting parameters for every point.

The most important parameters are

Parameter	Description
Pressure	The pressure which is applied when the probe is in contact with the surface
Duration	Specifies how long the probe should be in contact when performing a spotting operation
Height_Between_Spots	The distance by which the probe is retracted after performing a spotting operation
Idle_Pressure	The pressure which is applied between two spots, when the probe is moving. This can be used to prevent spilling the liquid or keep the probe filled

Spotting Calibration Workflow

This workflow creates a grid of spots with changing parameters. It allows to quickly determine reasonable parameter values and to fine-tune spot sizes.

The spotting procedure itself is the same as used in the spotting workflow except for the varying pressure and duration values.

Following parameters are available in addition to the ones in the spotting workflow

Parameter	Description
Spot_Separation	The distance between spot centers to be used when generating the grid
Repetitions_Per_Spot	How many times a single pressure/duration pair should be repeated. This can be used to ensure the reproducibility of a configuration. To visually offset the configurations from each other a margin of 2µm is added.
Start Pressure Final Pressure Pressure Steps	Defines the pressure steps that are used for generating the grid
Start Duration Final Duration Time Steps	Defines the duration values that are used for generating the grid