A new integrated platform for high quality and low cost gene expression analysis

DATE: September 15, 2015
TIME: 10:00AM Pacific time, 1:00PM Eastern time

The breadth of instruments available for quantitative PCR (qPCR) has continued to grow in the past 5-10 years. With older platforms now being retired and an abundance of new technologies available to replace them, lab managers, technicians, and researchers will need to effectively compare and evaluate the performance of these platforms. While new features such as multiplexing, microfluidics, and integration with liquid handling automation have enabled higher throughput and lower operating costs, it has made it increasing complex to readily compare different types of instruments and their respective performance characteristics.

As the list of features and specifications grows, understanding some of the key metrics of instrument performance will become critical for evaluating platforms that will best meet the needs of a laboratory's application focus and assay requirements. Unfortunately, instrument vendors have not consistently conformed to any particular standards for defining and assessing performance characteristics of qPCR instruments and rarely have the methods been adequately documented in the product literature.

In this webinar, we will define several key performance metrics of qPCR instruments such as dynamic range, Cq uniformity, sensitivity, and resolution, and further discuss their importance in practical terms. Using data from characterization and verification studies performed on the IntelliQube instrument from Douglas Scientific, we will also review approaches to evaluating these metrics, including assays and software tools that streamline the analysis and interpretation of performance testing results