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Integrating Digital PCR Into a Core Lab

376 views · Published 30 June 2014 · 4:11 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: Thermo Fisher Scientific · 2014 · Science & Technology

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Learn more about the QuantStudio 3D Digital PCR System: http://www.lifetechnologies.com/us/en/home/life-science/pcr/digital-pcr/quantstudio-3d-digital-pcr-system.html

Dr. Deborah Grove, Director of Genetic Analysis at the Genomics Core Facility for the Huck Institute of the Life Sciences at Penn State, discusses the potential of digital PCR within a core lab.  By integrating the QuantStudio® 3D Digital PCR System into the core lab, Deb notes that researchers will have access to technology that will enable them to detect molecules at low-level abundance with much of the research at the institute focusing on pathogens.  The Huck institute not only studies human, mouse, and rate, but a variety of organisms as the school has a heavy focus on agriculture.  As simple and streamlined platform, Deb believes the QuantStudio® 3D Digital PCR System is a nice ad-on to the core facility and may be something a researcher may adopt in their own lab.

I'm Deb Grove I'm Director of Genetic Analysis at the Genomics Core Facility for the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State. When I say 'Genomics Core' I mean any type of nucleic acid, DNA, RNA, including next gen sequencing, real time, genotyping, microarray, you name it. The main campus is Ag School and we also have the Medical Center, which is an hour and a half away. My first exposure to digital PCR was at an ABRF meeting. Based on previous adoption of new  technologies, I really expect that we'll be able to get people interested in using this pretty quickly. Digital PCR is really going to change the landscape because it's going to expand, across some borders that we had before with real time PCR, it's going to give us the ability to look at lower abundance, gene expression or an abundance of molecules that are just at lower levels, particular pathogens that we really can't be sure of it, the low level and so it's going to add an extra level to people's research and as at Penn State we've got a lot of different types of research and a lot of it's agriculture, where we're not doing just mouse, human and rat, but we're doing all kinds of different organisms.  So it's going to really be easy for those people to get answers with their low abundance questions. The potential for the digital PCR is that it's very versatile and can be universal, universally applied to... you know the spectrum of organisms and things that people have out there. People are interested in looking at things that they have a hard time quantifying.  Or they're unsure about.  So you know hopefully they can see with the data that it's the precision level's high and there's accuracy there and it's simple.  Also that it's very cost effective to do the assays, so I think that will be a big draw and it's very quick and easy. We have an animal diagnostics lab. For basic animal diagnostics, this would be a good place for people to start to develop new assays.  The chip is going to be more or less universal, one to the next and all they're going to be adding is their assay.  So being fast and precise and very accurate, it could lead to approved assays that they can use in the future. The experience I've had with the QuantStudio 3D is that it is quick and easy to set up a workflow and to use and get results back.  Once my technicians were trained they can set the assay up in just a few minutes, put it in a thermal cycler. It's not labor intensive. Once the chips are read, just moving the jump drive to computer and importing it into the software is very simple, using a chrome browser.  You can review the quality and the results, the analysis is I would say instantaneous, really, and you can go back and modify based on the chip quality and add data, subtract data, make a new experiment with the data you've had from before.  So it's very versatile.  I was really very happy that it was easy to work with. You can analyze the data anywhere as well.  You don't have to have a computer there or station for people to come in and use. I think it's a nice add-on for our facility.  We'd like to be able to have lots of different technologies for the researchers.  It may be something that a researcher will adopt in his own lab and have his own equipment, but for the time being they can't evaluate it, use it, benefit from it by us having it in the core facility.

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