Purchase Officer Cyclers/Kits

You are responsible for the purchase of medium to high capital equipment, like regular and real-time thermal cyclers, and/or you are responsible for the purchase of (diagnostic) PCR kits. You are keen to optimize the balance between quality, price and robustness. And therefore you are always searching for tools that can help you in finding that balance. Besides using these tools you are communicating and fine-tuning your judgment with the end-users’ department and possibly with the technical service department of your institute.

You may consider requesting a DRIFTCON temperature profile (temperature performance, accuracy) from the end-user, to support the purchase of a specific cycler. Depending on your individual situation you may ask your technical services department to advice you with a DRIFTCON temperature profile. You can request profiles for all of the tested cyclers, and support the purchase with the provided temperature profiles.

In your institute/company, DRIFCON might serve as an incoming quality control tool, for newly purchased regular and real-time thermal cyclers. It is a way to accept or reject instruments, based on the proof provided by DRIFTCON measurements, and to advice the accounting department on the payment of these machines.

Users of commercial kits may request kit manufacturers to provide prescribed threshold set(s) for temperature accuracy and block uniformity of the kit and/or cycler (see also “Application Threshold Settings“). A kit manufacturer may be requested by governmental auditors and other regulatory bodies to provide the temperature threshold settings for the supplied kit as well as the actual validation of these data in time (DRIFTCON driven).

Instruments thresholds settings (for a specific instrument and block type) are provided with the purchase of a DRIFTCON system. Other individual specific threshold settings may be purchased as software “ad on” (option). The provided specific instruments thresholds are extracted from the global database, which contains measurements from the same brand and type of machine. The provided threshold values are mean values plus or minus 2 x the standard deviation of the values (equals 95% of the population). Furthermore, you may request your cycler manufacturer to provide you with the instrument threshold settings.

Although the application thresholds are much more difficult and time consuming to design, they are superior to instrument thresholds. In other words: one is comparing if the cycler used to run an application is suitable for this application. If an end user is using a commercialised (diagnostic) kit (PCR, LCR, Real-Time PCR, RT-PCR etc) he or she may request the temperature profile thresholds from the kit manufacturer. Different protocols for the same kit can be advised, depending on the dynamic temperature performance (DRIFTCON driven) of the customers’ cycler. If the kit manufacturer does not have these thresholds available consider using and participating our discussion forum at the specific DRIFTCON website: www.driftcon.com or (if available) join one of the application (your application) threshold setting group.