Click the Add Plate ‘+’ icon in the Plates area, to add a plate to a protocol.
Select the plate you want from the pop-up form; there are tabs for 96 and 384 well plates.
You can only use plates which you have already installed, so if you cannot see the plate you want, you need to look in the ‘Community’ ‘Labware’ and download the plate before using it in a protocol.
Using the mouse to click and drag across, select the well array in the plate which you will use in the protocol. In the plates shown below, the left one has all wells selected as a well array, the right has none.
Then click the small ‘+’ above the plate, to add the well array to the protocol assets. You can create multiple well arrays in the same plate, using the same method.
You cannot make a plate an asset, only a well array so if you want to use the whole plate, drag to select all the wells then right click on the plate and use ‘Add to assets’.
To swap plate types in a protocol, click the ‘Swap Plate’ icon - the central one - above the plate you wish to swap out. If you had well arrays defined in that plate, they will be carried over to the new plate.
If your protocol uses multiple plates of the type you are swapping, firefly gives you the option to select to swap all plates to your new type.
To delete a plate, click the bin icon above the plate. If the plate was still in use in a protocol, deleting it will cause errors, so check the Errors list on the right for any steps which need correcting.
9.2.1 Copying plates
To copy a plate, select it in the Plates area and either use Ctrl-D or select Duplicate in the right mouse button menu.
If you had defined one or more well arrays in the plate, duplicate offers you the option to also copy the them.
Next Article - Designing protocols - 9.3 - Editing assets