Conversion from Nanoliters to Centiliters

Information about the Nanoliter (nL)

The nanolitre is a unit of volume equal to one billionth of a litre, written nL. It is a thousandth of a microlitre, and a nanolitre of water has a mass of one microgram. It is the scale at which liquid handling stops being a matter of pipettes and becomes a matter of engineered channels, printed droplets and acoustic pulses.

Microfluidics is built here. A lab-on-a-chip moves samples through channels a few tens of micrometres wide, so the volume inside any one segment is measured in nanolitres, and a whole analysis may consume less than a microlitre. Working at this scale changes the physics as well as the quantity: surface tension dominates gravity, flows stay orderly rather than turbulent, and mixing has to be engineered rather than assumed.

Digital polymerase chain reaction shows what the scale buys. A sample is divided into around twenty thousand droplets of roughly one nanolitre each, every droplet is amplified separately, and the number that come out positive gives an absolute count of target molecules rather than a relative measurement. Dividing a microlitre into thousands of countable compartments is only possible because a nanolitre is small enough to hold either one target molecule or none.

Drug screening moves liquid without touching it. Acoustic dispensers use a focused sound pulse to eject droplets of two and a half nanolitres from an open well, with no tip and therefore no cross-contamination and no plastic waste. A screening plate of fifteen hundred wells can be filled with distinct compounds in a few minutes at this volume.

Printing and spotting work at the same magnitude. A microarray spot holds between half a nanolitre and five, an inkjet droplet is a few picolitres so a nanolitre is several hundred drops, and single-cell platforms encapsulate individual cells in droplets of this size because a mammalian cell occupies only a few picolitres.

Handling nanolitres reliably is mostly a fight against evaporation. A one-nanolitre droplet exposed to air can lose a measurable fraction of itself in seconds, so devices at this scale work under oil, in sealed channels or in humidity-controlled enclosures, and that constraint shapes the instruments more than the dispensing itself does.

One nanolitre equals 0.001 microlitres, 0.000001 millilitres, 0.001 cubic millimetres, or 1,000,000 cubic micrometres.

Information about the Centiliter (cL)

The centilitre is a unit of volume equal to one hundredth of a litre, or ten millilitres. Its symbol is cL, and the lower-case cl is also used. Unlike most centi-prefixed units it has a real commercial life, because it happens to be the size that suits drink labelling, and in several countries it is the form printed on almost every bottle.

Drink containers are its main employment. In France, Belgium, Italy and Spain a wine bottle is labelled 75 cL, a beer 33 or 50 cL, a soft drink 33 cL, and a spirits miniature 5 cL. The same containers carry 750 ml and 330 ml in Britain, Germany and most of the English-speaking world, which is why identical bottles appear to bear different numbers depending on where they were filled.

Bar measures follow the same split. A standard spirit serving is 4 cL in France and 2 or 4 cL in Germany and Austria, while Britain pours 25 or 35 millilitres and the United States uses fluid ounces. European cocktail recipes are written in centilitres throughout, so a classic proportion of six parts to three to one appears as 6 cL, 3 cL and 1 cL, which reads more cleanly than the millilitre equivalents.

There is no legal difference between the forms. European Union labelling rules accept millilitres, centilitres and litres, so the choice is a matter of national typographic habit rather than of regulation. Where centilitres are used, the number on a bottle stays between one and a hundred for every ordinary container size, which is exactly the range a prefix is supposed to deliver.

The unit is also easy to picture. Ten millilitres is two teaspoons, a generous mouthful of water, or the dose measure supplied with a bottle of cough syrup. A tablespoon is one and a half centilitres, an espresso is about three, and a wine glass poured to a standard measure is twelve to fifteen.

Converting between systems needs some care because a centilitre falls between the two customary small measures. It is 0.338 United States fluid ounces and 0.352 imperial fluid ounces, so neither reads as a round number, and drink volumes converted between Europe and North America almost always end up rounded rather than exact.

One centilitre equals 10 millilitres, 0.01 litres, about 0.338 US fluid ounces, or about 0.352 imperial fluid ounces.