title: dealing with data labels in 96 well plate with python
body: <p>I do have data from a 96 well plate (mostly in excel):</p>
  
  <p>A 96 well plate, schematic provided by <a href="http://www.cellsignet.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.cellsignet.com</a>:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DLb8V.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DLb8V.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></a><br>
  <sub>(source: <a href="http://www.cellsignet.com/media/plates/96.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">cellsignet.com</a>)</sub>  </p>
  
  <p>Out of each cell we can do some experiment and read values from it, the data looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    1    2    3    4    .    . 
  A   9.1  8.7  5.6  4.5
  B   8.7  8.5  5.4  4.3
  C   4.3  4.5  7.6  6.7
  D   4.1  6.0  7.0  6.1
  .
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I also have excel files with the sample names:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    1    2    3    4    .    . 
  A   l1   l2   l3   l4 
  B   l1   l2   l3   l4
  C   ds1  ds2  ds3  ds4
  D   ds1  ds2  ds3  ds4
  .
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The duplicate entries are two wells with the same sample loaded.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to read in the data (no problem) and assign the labels to the data points and group the data according to the labels. In pandas i can read in the data and group it according to the column and row headers. But how can i group according to the sample names ?</p>