With the advent of NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) came the ability to learn more about genomes than ever before and also the ability to do so faster. This trend has done nothing but continue with speed and data quality improving though chemistry and platform advances.

However, NGS is by no means a cheap commodity in any lab. With systems ranging from around $150,000 to easily in excess of $1,000,000 the cost of purchasing and running such systems is still very high, driving a need to get the most from every run.

Library quantification is an area where improvements have been made and technologies incorporated to help, namely the use of qPCR, which has in recent years become the gold standard for NGS library quantification.

Library quantification is used to define how much template is loaded onto the NGS platform, too little and the run will have low efficiencies, too much and the efficiencies suffer also but there is also the risk of the run failing completely, a costly mistake.  Accurate qPCR based NGS library quantification can help maximise the efficiency of the NGS runs.

However not all qPCR system are capable of sufficient thermal accuracy to perform NGS library quantification repeatedly and accurately. Using lower spec systems can leave NGS users unaware of whether or not their libraries are quantified correctly, with obvious knock on effects in data quality and efficiencies.

Standard qPCR systems have a thermal accuracy of around  0.5°C at about the 50 to 60°C range. This however can often be insufficient to allow users to precisely define the cluster density, limiting their return from an expensive NGS run. Sometimes runs can fail as the qPCR platform may have under represented the library concentration leading to overloading the NGS system.

With the Eco 48, which has a temperature uniformity of  0.1°C (recorded at 95°C,  with no settle time) no system bias will be introduced into your sample by poor temperature control giving end users confidence in the result and the ability to maximise efficiencies from the NGS platform, an enormous advantage and potential cost saving every run. With the Eco 48s unique and patented thermal system, at the heart of which lies a liquid filled silver and gold block, the Eco 48 is the world’s most accurate block based qPCR system. This thermal control gives users more confidence that their NGS libraries are right where they need to be in terms of library quantification and allows users to get the most from NGS runs without having to worry about loading too much template and that run potentially failing.

This unequalled thermal accuracy not only yields benefits to NGS library quantification but applies across all qPCR applications, why not challenge the Eco 48 in your own lab and see for yourself.

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