Description
Manipulating liquids efficiently and precisely is a common need across scientific disciplines. Moreover, the study of complex systems often requires experimental approaches able to assess many variables at once. To address the constraints of conventional approaches, we introduce Surface Patterned Omniphobic Tiles (SPOTs)—a scalable, low-cost platform that combines geometry and surface engineering to leverage capillarity for liquid metering and manipulation. By building on discontinuous wetting principles, SPOTs enable hundreds to thousands of independent experiments in parallel without the need for complex robotics or costly consumables. The system supports a broad range of liquid types and volumes (from <10 nL to >10 µL) with high precision.
We showcase how SPOTs empower diverse applications, from optimizing enzyme kinetics and mapping reaction landscapes in high-throughput chemistry, to screening antimicrobial combinations, evaluating combinatorially different perovskite materials, and genotyping microbial isolates. The simplicity and versatility of SPOTs allow researchers from biology, chemistry, and materials science to rapidly prototype, test, and iterate experiments at high throughput and high performance, giving an accessible tool for data-driven discovery.