A microplate reader is probably one of the most expensive items of medical laboratory equipment. The most inexpensive and the simplest of these medical laboratory equipments could cost as much as $ 6,000. The high end versions of the microplate reader will cost a minimum of around $ 20,000.

A microplate reader is a medical laboratory equipment that is designed to detect biological, chemical or physical events of a sample. When buying this piece of medical laboratory equipment, hospitals and laboratories first need to decide the range of uses to which they are going to subject the medical laboratory equipment. This will determine the model of the microplate reader that needs to be chosen.

Some of the most common uses for this piece of medical laboratory equipment is to run ELISAs, protein assays, cell growth assays and nucleic acid quantitation. The microplate reader is also medical laboratory equipment that can be used to quantitate DNA and RNA in a high throughput fashion. The microplate reader is also used by several laboratories to do fluorescence- or luminescence-based assays.

This medical laboratory equipment can also be used to kinetic assays, heat or chill plates, or scan wavelengths. Laboratories need to determine the wavelengths that they require this piece of medical laboratory equipment to operate in.

Once a buyer decides on the type of microplate reader then it is time to decide on the software that goes along with the piece of medical laboratory equipment. The software used on the medical laboratory equipment will depend on the kinds of work the reader is subject to. Large laboratories that run several protein assays simultaneously as well as several protein assays and ELISA's will need high end software that requires minimal manual manipulation.

The first design of this medical laboratory equipment was created in 1951 by Hungarian, Dr. G. Takatsky. He created a model of this equipment with 6 rows of 12 "wells" in Lucite. By the early 1990s, more than 15 companies produced various range of microplates with different features. In 2000, researchers estimated that there were 125 million pieces of this medical laboratory equipment in use. A number of companies have developed robots to specifically handle SBS microplates used with some pieces of this medical laboratory equipment. These robots may be liquid handlers which aspirate or dispense liquid samples from and to these plates, or "plate movers" which transport them between instruments.

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