From plate reader to defensible result
Meniscus turns a raw microplate export into a publication-ready answer — layout, curve fit, QC verdict and report — without uploading a single well.
Free for academic research · No account required
Plate
Standard curve
- Model
- 4PL
- R²
- 0.9877
- EC50
- 201 ng/mL
Three steps, and you can show your working
The whole path is Library → Import → Layout → Analyse → Report. Nothing is hidden behind a wizard, and every number stays traceable to the wells it came from.
Import the reader file
Drop the CSV, TSV or XLSX your instrument produced. Meniscus recognises eight instrument formats and shows you exactly which block of cells it read before anything is committed.
Lay out the plate
Paint roles onto wells — standards, unknowns, blanks, controls. Fill a serial dilution in one action, save the layout as a template, undo anything.
Get a defensible number
Pick a model and read the fit, the QC verdict and every sample concentration. Export a print-ready report carrying the file hash, the engine version and a written methods paragraph.
Every number expands into the formula that made it
Click any result and it unfolds into each step with the values substituted — the replicate mean, the blank subtraction, the inverted calibration, the dilution. If a step cannot be written out, it does not ship.
It is the difference between a number you reported and a number you can defend in a lab meeting.
Built for the awkward parts
The bits a spreadsheet quietly gets wrong, and the bits a reviewer asks about.
Six curve models
Linear, quadratic, 4PL, 5PL, Michaelis-Menten and Hill dose-response, fitted by a from-scratch Levenberg-Marquardt optimiser with weighting and IRLS.
A QC verdict, not just a number
Replicate precision, back-calculated recovery, monotonicity and residual pattern, each against a stated threshold — and what to do when one fails.
Confidence intervals and limits
Parameter standard errors, AICc, prediction bands, LOD and LOQ by both the blank and ICH Q2 calibration routes.
Outlier tests that name themselves
Dixon's Q and Grubbs' with published critical values, so an exclusion is a decision you can defend rather than a point you quietly deleted.
Nothing leaves the machine
No account, no upload, no telemetry, no network calls of any kind. Fonts are self-hosted. The whole thing runs offline, which is also why IT never has to approve it.
Your work stays put
Workbooks save to this browser automatically and reopen with the model, weighting and reads they were saved with. Export a .meniscus file to move one between machines.
We publish what is verified, and what is not
Meniscus ships a confidence ledger. Each module is checked against an independent oracle — SciPy or NumPy running the same fixture — and given one of three honest statuses. Tests we wrote ourselves are not evidence.
| Module | Checked against | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 4PL model | scipy.optimize.curve_fit | Verified |
| Linear and quadratic regression | numpy.linalg.lstsq, polyfit | Verified |
| t-distribution, Grubbs', Dixon's Q | scipy.stats, published tables | Verified |
| ΔΔCt, Pfaffl, efficiency | numpy | Verified |
| Growth µmax, doubling, lag, AUC | scipy.stats.linregress, numpy | Verified |
| Weighted-fit parameters | no external oracle yet | Internal only |
| Confidence intervals, AICc | no external oracle yet | Internal only |
It already reads your instrument
Eight formats out of the box, including the messy real-world exports with preamble rows and merged headers. If yours is missing, send a file and it gets added.
Free for researchers. Paid where it earns its keep.
If you are a scientist doing your own work, it costs nothing. Institutions pay for the paper trail and someone to call.
Academic
- Every analysis feature
- Unlimited plates and workbooks
- Full report export
- No account, no signup
Doing individual research and want to talk first? info@meniscus.app
Lab
Most labs- Everything in Academic
- A signed validation report naming your institution
- Support within two working days
- Custom instrument profiles for your instruments
Core facility
- Everything in Lab
- Unlimited users on site
- A one-hour onboarding session
- A named contact, not a shared inbox
The evidence itself is free and always will be — the validation materials are published openly at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22258400. What a licence buys is a report naming your institution, tied to the version you run and signed, which is the form an audit or a QA file needs.
Commercial and biotech licensing at $480 per seat per year. Ask for a quote.
Get Meniscus
Install it, or just open it. Both are the same app, and both work offline once you have them.
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · installs without administrator rights
This build is not code-signed yet, so Windows will warn you it is from an unknown publisher. You can check you got the real file: its SHA-256 is
bb04bc2abd793ff9e401862975a0e891da90b112d7ba5f415898624dc0fb6298
Get-FileHash .\Meniscus_0.8.0_x64-setup.exe