Technical Service Departments

Typically, you are responsible for the service and maintenance of cyclers in your institute or company. In some cases the purchase department requests your technical advice. You are responsible for handling claims of “non well working” or “incorrect” cyclers, but you do not have access to high accurate, multi-sensor and dynamic measurement systems like DRIFTCON. The use of DRIFTCON as a “diagnostic tool” is highly recommended. You may consider recommending the regular use of a DRIFTCON system by your department to exclude variations in results generated by a lack of performance of non-cycler related issues (enzymes, primers, protocol, disposables etc.) If your institute/company has cyclers for real-time applications, the use of DRIFTCON is strongly recommended.

You can use DRIFTCON to determine the temperature profile of the cycler. DRIFTCON will recognize minor inaccuracies in the block construction, like incorrectly placed sensors, non- uniform peltiers (so called “hot” and “cold” spots), block sandwich tension problems, heater un-uniformities etc. as well as wearing problems in time. By using DRIFTCON one can set thresholds for temperature accuracy and block uniformity of the specific cycler type. In other words: define what the maximum temperature in-accuracy and block un-uniformity of the cycler is, which still are accepted before you categorize it as being “out of specs” (see also instrument-based thresholds). Service departments may consider upgrading their “instrument specs” with data based on high accuracy, dynamic, multi sensor temperature measurements. (DRIFTCON driven).

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.

Threshold settings are used to compare the temperature performance of the cycler against (pre) defined thresholds.

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).

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. Consider using our discussion forum at the specific DRIFTCON website: www.driftcon.com or (if available) join one of the application threshold settings discussion groups.