System and method for flexibly representing and processing assay plates

A non-transitory computer readable medium having stored thereon a computer program which, when executed on a computing system operatively connected to an instrument to process an assay plate, the assay plate comprising a plurality of wells, and each of the plurality of wells comprises a well point, the well point being a point inside each of the plurality of wells, the assay plate having associated geometry data that includes one or more predefined points of interest, the method employing a computerized set of instructions implementing a tree of one or more multi-dimensional coordinate space objects, wherein the tree has a root coordinate space and each coordinate space object has a plurality of subspaces, each of the subspaces being anchored in the coordinate space object at a predefined subspace anchor point and wherein one or more of the plurality of subspaces may contain one or more of the predefined points of interest, wherein each of the plurality of subspaces is associated with at least one of the plurality of wells, the method comprising the steps of:

• ascertaining a point of interest the one or more predefined points of interest;
• resolving the point of interest to the root coordinate space as an ascertained point;
• instructing the instrument to move to the ascertained point of interest by traversing the tree of coordinate spaces;
• and
• instructing the instrument to move to a second point, wherein the second point is directly above the well point of one of the plurality of wells.

A system having at least one central processing unit (CPU), and at least one memory storage device having stored therein a set of steps for execution by the at least one CPU, the steps providing, when so executed, an instrument configured to process an assay plate, the assay plate comprising a plurality of wells, and each of the plurality of wells comprises a well point, the well point being a point inside each of the plurality of wells, the assay plate having associated geometry data that includes one or more predefined points of interest, the method employing a computerized set of instructions implementing a tree of one or more multi-dimensional coordinate space objects, wherein the tree has a root coordinate space and each coordinate space object has a plurality of subspaces, each of the subspaces being anchored in the coordinate space object at a predefined subspace anchor point and wherein one or more of the plurality of subspaces may contain one or more of the predefined points of interest, wherein each of the plurality of subspaces is associated with at least one of the plurality of wells, wherein the CPU is configured to further perform the following steps comprising:

• ascertaining a point of interest of the one or more predefined points of interest;
• resolving the point of interest to the root coordinate space as an ascertained point;
• instructing the instrument to move to the ascertained point of interest by traversing the tree of coordinate spaces;
• and
• instructing the instrument to move to a second point, wherein the second point is directly above the well point of one of the plurality of wells.