This guide outlines Reshapes’ recommendations for an integration strategy when a customer wants to control label design and printing through their LIMS or another system. It defines how to design plate labels that are reliably readable in the Reshape HTID. It covers recommended plate-code structure (including assay identifiers), along with Data Matrix symbol requirements such as minimum module size and required quiet zone/whitespace to avoid scan failures.
Example design:
Plate code structure
The plate code is used by the Reshape platform to identify and link the analysis result back to a specific plate. This is especially important when results need to be pulled back into a system such as a LIMS. For such integrations, plate codes need to uniquely identify the plate they belong to. This means plates holding different dilutions and even replicates should have unique plate codes.
When relying on your own plate codes, it is important to have a strategy for mapping the results back into LIMS using only the information provided in the plate codes.
An important rule to remember:
The reshape system reads the plate code and returns the plate code and the result - Nothing else of relevance for the integration.
The Reshape Platform will need to know what analysis to apply to each plate in the processes.
This can be done by encoding the assay information in the plate code. We recommend doing that by adding a fed character at the end of the plate code. The Reshape platform will be configured to extract and validate this information using a regular expression (regex). Adding a separator such as “-” between the unique plate ID and the assay ID ensures that the assay ID is extractable, even if adding multiple characters are needed to identify assays in the future.
The customer and Reshape will align on a translation table for Assays ↔ Assay IDs.
Suggestion for translation table:
Assay | Assay ID for plate codes |
Example Assay 1 | -A |
Example Assay 2 | -B |
Example Assay 3 | -C |
Example Assay … | -… |
Symbol Recommendations
Reshape recommends using a Data Matrix symbol for your labels. It has optimal information density, is easily readable by the HTID, can be printed in high quality by most label printers, and has strong error-correction capabilities.
Requirements for the Data Matrix symbol:
To ensure reliable reading in the Reshape HTID, the cells/modules in the Datamatrix are required to be ≥0,5 mm.
Sufficient white space is needed around the symbol. This is required to be at the width of 1 cell/module. This means the symbol cannot be placed too close to e.g. the edge of the label or to text on the label.
