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.

Nanoliter conversion table