Plate Editor: free multi-well plate layout designer & dose-response analyzer

Plan the plate and read the result, in one place

Most plate-layout tools either live behind a login or stop at “color the wells.” This one does the whole loop: design the layout (samples, controls, standards, compound dilution series), load your readout, see it as a heatmap, and get a dose-response fit (EC₅₀/IC₅₀, Hill, R²) straight off the concentrations you laid out.

It handles every common format from 6 to 1536 wells and runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Use it now

Found a bug or want a feature? Tell us — we read everything.

What it does

Layout designer. Pick a content type — sample, positive control, negative control, blank, standard, or compound — then paint wells by clicking or dragging, or fill a whole row, column, or plate at once. Every well can carry a label, a compound name, a concentration, and a unit.

Dilution series. Give a compound, a starting concentration, a fold factor, the number of steps, a start well, and a direction; the tool lays the gradient down for you.

Result data. Paste a grid of values — one plate row per line, tab- or comma-separated — or Well,Value lines. Switch to the Heatmap view to see the readout mapped onto the plate with a color scale.

Dose-response. For any compound with concentrations and values, the tool averages replicates and fits a 4-parameter logistic curve, reporting EC₅₀/IC₅₀, Hill slope, top, bottom, and R², with a semi-log plot of the data and fit.

Export & import. PNG and SVG of the plate map, a per-well CSV, and JSON for a full round-trip so you can save a layout and reopen it later.

Click “Try example” in the tool to load two 8-point dilution series in triplicate and see the fits immediately.

How the fit works

The dose-response model is the standard 4-parameter logistic:

y = bottom + (top − bottom) / (1 + (x / EC50)^hill)

It’s fit by a Nelder–Mead simplex that minimizes the squared error (with the EC₅₀ parameterized in log-space for stability, and both inhibition and activation orientations tried). On clean synthetic curves it recovers the known EC₅₀ and Hill slope to R² = 1.

Embed it on your site

Three lines of HTML — no backend to configure.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://www.37degrees.io/interactive-tools/plate-editor/styles.css" />

<div id="plate-widget-embed"></div>

<script>
  // Optional: window.PLATE_THEME = "light";
</script>
<script src="https://www.37degrees.io/interactive-tools/plate-editor/widget.js"></script>

Free for typical research use. Heavy / production use? Get in touch.

Credits

Built and maintained by 37degrees. Standard 4PL dose-response math with a hand-rolled Nelder–Mead optimizer — no third-party libraries, and no data leaves the browser.